Hi all,
I just came back to my blog after a really busy second half of 2018 at work and in my private life. I can’t believe that I haven’t posted anything on my own blog since March 🙁 I have held a webinar and posted some on mycugc.org instead, but I really want 2019 to also be the year where this blog will become more active. I will make sure that any blogs I post on other sites will be posted here as well after a few weeks on the primary site of the blog post.
Looking back on 2018 I must admit it has been an AWESOME year. It has been a full year of being a Citrix Technology Advocate (CTA), and I am really proud of this. I enjoy helping out in the community, write blog posts, doing webinars and just helping people who reach out with whatever I can. Probably most of my community work is not visible on any blog site or webinar, but that is just fine by me, I get to help those individuals out and that is enough for me. I hope I get to stay on the CTA program and also that I at some point in the future do enough and will be good enough to join the CTP program. 2018 was also the year I got to join the Citrix
Partner Technical Expert Council (PTEC) where we get to sit with the product managers and tell them how we use Citrix products in our daily work at our customers. I really enjoyed the way PTEC is held since the sessions are just as much us as the audience who is talking as it is Citrix sharing their knowledge and expertise with us.
Besides all the Citrix work this year I also went to the PowerShell conference in Germany for the first time and this was also really great. There are so many skilled people at this conference that all want to share their knowledge and they are so approachable as well. It is also a conference that actually makes me feel like a total newbie with PowerShell, but I know that this is partly because these people are so good at what they do and partly just me being wrong because I actually do know something about using PowerShell. Just to put a bit of it into perspective about the skill level, several of people on the PowerShell team from Microsoft was at the conference, Jeffrey Snower himself was there and several people who are contributing to the open source PowerShell Core were there. These people are way out of my league in case of knowing PowerShell, but what I also got from the conference is, that everyone who is using it and sharing knowledge is a valued member of the community and that is just an awesome feeling.
E2EVC in Amsterdam was also a first for me, but it will definitely not be the last. This conference is all about community and sharing with peers. I saw a lot of good sessions and spend time with people I didn’t know in advance after the sessions for the day was over. This kind of openness is something I really appreciate and therefore also an event I will go to again and hopefully also do a session on my own there.
So what is on the schedule for 2019? I can say that I will be off to a flying start since I am going to PTEC and Citrix Summit in Orlando. I will be flying out on January 3rd and home again the 12th, 1,5 week of Citrix greatness with a lot of peers and Citrix employees. When I get home from Orlando I will be giving a techtalk on the news that we are allowed to share, so this is also nice to look forward to. Work projects for the year are going to be fully automated Citrix environment for a large client integrating our automation solution with their own CI/CD pipeline so when our customer release a new version of their software we will build a new Citrix image in their UAT environment. I will also be working on cloud deployments in 2019 which I hope also mean I can finally get my deployment tool updated and published to the community. This deployment tool was a goal for 2018 as well, but due to different work assignments and time constraints this was not possible. As I mentioned in the first section of this article it is also a goal to keep this blog alive and I am dedicated on doing so.
Now I just want to thank everyone of you for reading my blog, thank you for 2018 and hopefully I can deliver some interesting posts for you in 2019 and if I am not blogging on something you need input for, please do reach out to me and I will do my best to help out. Have a great New Year everyone!!!
/Martin