As we ease into the last few days of 2024, I like to close out this one last task and that's reflecting back on all the fun, challenges, and travel over the past year.
While it takes a bit of research to gather all the facts and figures from the last year, it's not a hard one to write. I've been sharing on this site for almost 20 years now and without ads or trying to earn anything from it. It's been truly an open and honest effort to communicate with the world. Funny thing is, when I started out I never imagined that it would take off like it has, eclipsing over 3.8 million views at the time of this writing.
With that in mind, let's dive right into the main focus, where me and my teams are focusing on the four pillars of our role; speaking, publishing, socializing, and hands-on content generation. On top of that, collateral damage is traveling the globe to do it.
This year I've settled into the world of cloud native observability (o11y) and felt truly grounded in the problems, the challenges, and the solutions we are offering. I've continued to preach the open source gospel as a Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Ambassador and met a lot of new friends, speaking to many of you on the challenges you are facing with stress, burn-out, cloud data, and SRE tasks.
My team expanded from two to three technical marketing roles, and just this month I've acquired the community team bringing the total to five full time advocates for cloud native observability across metrics, events, traces, logs, and dashboards.
Travel and events
I made an effort to reduce team travel by 20%, which was pretty easy actually to do. I myself was able to reduce it a bit, though not as much as I was hoping. The year 2024 included 21 trips to 35 different cities and 10 different countries with destinations including:
- London, UK (3x)
- Oslo, Norway
- Alicante, Spain
- Bologna, Italy
- Paris, France
- Miami, FL
- Napels, FL
- Chicago, IL
- Milan, Italy
- Edinburg, Scotland
- Portland, OR
- Amsterdam, Netherlands (3x)
- Glasgow, Scotland
- Frankfurt, Germany
- Mallorca, Spain
- Berlin, Germany
- Zadar, Croatia
- Porto, Portugal
- Seattle, WA
- San Jose, CA
- Salt Lake City, UT
- Munich, Germany
These included both personal trips related to family illnesses and events or meetings. Some of the events I participated in on the road:
- Cloud Native London Meetup
- KCD Oslo
- Incontro DevOps Italia
- KubeCon EU
- Infobip Shift NA
- Platmosphere
- Cloud Native + K8S Edinburgh Meetup
- Monitorama
- DevOpsDays Amsterdam
- Tech Meetup Glasgow
- PromCon EU
- Infobip Shift EU
- KCD Porto
- Cloud Native Rejekts NA
- Runbook by PagerDuty Meetup
- KubeCon NA
- SREDay Amsterdam
- DevOpsCon Munich
- Dutch Cloud Native Day
Event trips are some of my favorite times, as I get to meet up with friends around the world and interact with the communities that matter.
Publishing
This year my blog turned 19 years old in production and had a bit of an o11y surge of interest that saw monthly visitors and page views topping out around 180k. At the time of this writing it's around 3.8 million views and I'm happy to see that it has such value for so many visitors as that's always been the goal.
This blog offers free content (see the license at the footer of this blog) and without any advertising. It's about learning and not about earning. I've published over 62 articles here this year on a large range of topics, but mostly focused on cloud native observability. I've also continued to find syndication across several sites this year, from DZone, Java Code Geeks, TheNewsStack, and our company blog.
The series I started to document my journey in observability, O11y Guide, continued to grow with an array on topics that were all part of my observability learnings in 2024.
Workshop and other coding content
This year we expanded our observability workshop collection with a new addition, Fluent Bit. Along with this there were several iterations of updates and expansions to the existing Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and Perses workshops.
You now have the 101 learning paths to get you started with:
- OpenTelemetry - cloud native tracing
- Fluent Bit - telemetry pipeline
- Perses - cloud native open visualization
- Prometheus - cloud native metrics monitoring
The plans for 2025 will include more CNCF projects and continued expansion of our workshop offerings, so stay tuned for more!
Fun side projects
This year golf was my number one focus for sports activity. I mentioned replacing my high school golf set last year with something that provided all the advancements they've included in a modern set. This dropped me down to a 14 handicap and the improvements continued with me reaching a single digit handicap of 9.4.
The re-gripping of golf clubs has not quite turned into a side business, but I'm doing it fairly regularly for both family and friends. I'm happy to help anyone that needs new grips, just provide your clubs and the grips, I've got the rest covered.
Thanks for the journey
This journey would be nothing without our readers, listeners, watchers, and the ones providing feedback. For that I thank you from the bottom of my heart and I'm so very much looking forward to chatting with you in all the places where we get to share, discover, and spend time together around the world.
Happy holidays and end of the year to you and your families as you transition into 2026, I'm looking forward to seeing you all online and in person next year!
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