Personal review of 2016

Here we are, the beginning of another year.

I usually take this phase of the year to plan out what will be my personal goals and achievements for this year and envision and will happen to me personally during this year. With that, I also take into account the decisions, beliefs and thoughts that I have had over the last year. This is all very dear and personal to me, too personal to write about it here to be honest.
I will write this post with some thoughts about some technology and what happened last year.

For me, one of the biggest breakthroughs of last year was the success of Tesla and its self-driving cars technology. With a single software udpate to the car, you have an autopilot enabled car and already rolling out the second round of updates with tons of improvements, really impressive job by the engineers at Tesla, specially on such a sensitive area of the human life which is transportation. Looking forward to see what Tesla will bring this year to all of us.

The hacking of DynDNS and a new perspective on what the ** are we doing with device security nowadays. It is just too easy to hack camera devices nowadays via the public Internet. I mean, if you spend 10 minutes of your time you can find a google query to find these open cameras. Besides this being kind of creepy, it also makes us think on who is deploying and using these cameras… Bruce Schneier has an interesting article about that.

Containers and MicroOS are the way to go. 2016 continued to burst us with new developments on the containers technology, bringing LXD / LXC further as well as Docker and Rocket. There is a lot of time and money being spent on the development and spread of this technology which makes companies, developers and system administrators looking at this technology more and more. For me personally I have been not doing anything on the past few months besides deploying new containers and finding new strategies of deployment of them, looking forward to give a bit back to the community during this next year.

Virtual reality is giving its first big steps in the consumer market. Sony has launched their VR googles for the Playstation 4, VR kits are starting to get more affordable which has open a new market for gaming, social and medicine to make use of this technology. Although I feel that it is still a very green tech, 2017 will bring a lot of new developments into the area, looking forward to let this technology mature and make good use of it.

Automation. From fabrics to our deployment processes, it is making us more efficient and be able to spend more time doing interestnig things other than doing boring and repetitive and often dangerous work. Governments are not taking this new technology in consideration and the impact that it has on the population, althought there are some efforst to bring basic income in some cities in Europe, I hope that we can bring more visibility of the impact of automation to the governments.

Best wishes and let 2017 might be even better than 2016.