2018 in review - Portfolio Architecture and storytelling

Every year ends and every year it's always good to look back on the times we have shared, the trips taken and what's been accomplished.

This year I transitioned into a new team focused on the entire Portfolio, specifically generating solution architecture blueprints.

While I continue to function as a Global Technology Evangelist, I've also been tasked with creating generic architectural blueprints of real customer based solutions that make use of the open technology portfolio at Red Hat. Watch for more of this in my publishing, social media, and talks in 2019.

I am now approaching ten years at Red Hat and we're living in interesting times. With that in mind, here's my review activities from 2018.

Publishing

Writing's still a high point in my role at Red Hat, with 55+ articles published on this site, 18+ articles syndicated on DZone, and 17+ articles featured elsewhere in other channels. 

My book project titled, Effective Business Process Management with JBoss BPM was purchased from Manning by Red Hat.  The content has been put in to a book format to be released as a free download through the Red Hat Developers Program. There were even printed versions signed and given away at Red Hat Summit 2019, but if you missed that you can still contact me for a free copy as long as they last.

My hobby of writing as a sports journalist for RedSoxLife.com continued, but at a much slower this year.

I only pushed out one article a month on average, but that will again pick up once I finish up the book.

Finally, I spent a lot of time this year presenting on the softer skills in open source. Storytelling and how to sessions for jump starting a career in open source touched off a series of trips and conference visits this year. A complex central US tour of customers, a recorded session on a special stage in Croatia and Raleigh were the results.

Check out this small sample (just 6 minutes):

It's nice to reach a stage in my career where it's possible to share experience, tricks, and just simple things that can make others better at what they do. It's the most rewarding part of working in open source, the sharing, mentoring, and collaboration that makes all around you grow.

Coding, demos, workshops

This year saw the Red Hat Demo Central repository complete its third year since the first commit on April 1, 2016, but move to a new location on GitLab.com.

It's expanded to over 25 individual projects illustrating containers, cloud operations, deployments, AppDev in the Cloud and more. One of the most exciting and most used project is the OpenShift Container Platform installation, which is easy for anyone to do in just a few minutes.

I've become rather entranced by the tooling provide to projects hosted on Gitlab and have migrated all my projects and workshops over:

• My projects
• Cloud Agile Integration developer workshop 
• Practical rules and automation workshop

These workshops are undergoing revisions and updates to add new product innovations so be sure to check them out as they evolve.

Travel

Being on the road is part of this job, sometimes it's a lot of fun, sometimes it's not always all that you might think it's cracked up to be.

I have enjoyed all of the trips this year, covering over 143,000 km, 32 cities and 7 countries. The people you meet, the knowledge shared, it's all worth the time spent getting from one destination to another. 

Here are the places I visited to talk about Red Hat technologies or meet with our partners and customers:

• Raleigh, NC (4x)
• Rome, Italy
• Dallas, TX (2x)
• Portland, OR
• Seattle, WA
• San Francisco, CA
• London, UK
• Split, Croatia
• Edinburgh, Scotland
• Orlando, FL (2x)
• St. Louis, MI
• Washington, DC
• Munich, Germany
• Amsterdam, Netherlands (5x)

This year travels were more focused on EMEA and NA, who knows where next year will take me.

Thanks to you all 

I certainly hope you enjoyed what I was able to bring to you in 2018.

I want to thank you personally for attending any of the webinars, conference sessions, workshops, JUG's, and JBug's were our paths might have crossed or for just taking the time to read a published article.

2019 kicks off fast and furious with travel to all corners of the world, so stay tuned in here as we explore the amazing things you can achieve with open technologies and hybrid multicloud!