It’s that time of the year again, so some best wishes and a minor retrospective are in order.

First of all, I wish you and your family and friends all the best for 2020. Also, I hope you can enjoy the holiday season with some time off.

2019 was a busy year for me. My two main achievements were creating a LinkedIn Learning course on RabbitMQ and co-founding a local developers meetup group called Building Bruges.

The RabbitMQ course was hard work, but fun:

And I was guided through all of it by some great people, not in the least my producer, Lori (thanks!).

Together with some great people, we started a new local community in my home town, Bruges. While a regular sized town with several IT companies/departments, we felt there was a lack of developer community. So we started our own: Building Bruges. We’ve already organized two sessions (with 30-40 attendees!) and have two more in the pipeline.

Business-wise, I really started focusing more on what I want to make my core business: helping organizations gain confidence when deploying. My ideal client is a scale-up that has some legacy code with technical debt because there wasn’t enough time and resources during the startup phase.

That’s why I started a separate blog, which is more focused on legacy code and aimed at non-technical people. This blog has traditionally been a bit all over the place, depending on what I’m currently working on.

Though I did write a series on fixing a real world legacy application. I also wrote more than 20 articles for HitSubscribe, some of which I republished here:

• Finding Unknown Bugs with Property-Based Testing
• Unit Testing Best Practices: 7 Ways to Improve Your Tests
• Log Parser Tutorial: Learn to Parse Many Formats

What will 2020 bring? Hopefully the Roaring Twenties for everyone! For me, a new LinkedIn Learning course on software architecture and more writing. As for anything else, we’ll just have to wait and see.

Happy 2020!