Review of 2017 and looking ahead to 2018

This last year has been a fascinating one for me, where self-discovery and self-reinvention have been one of the leading changes.

Before I dwell further on the predictions, let me start by look at reviewing the post from last year where I try to make some 2017 predictions on the tech field.

Tesla continued to rock 2017 with the SpaceX breakthroughs. Without many new things happening on the road part of Tesla besides promises of electric trucks and the fastest road vehicle ever built, I am not expecting that Tesla will deliver something new in this area during this year.

Security-wise… LOL! This last year has been a total disaster. Between data breaches from Equifax and Uber, A ‘good guy(?)’ who bricked more than 10Million devices retired, another NSA data breach… I could write an extensive article about this, but a lot has been written, and I bet you can find a lot of more of these 2017 hack reviews out there. Will it be worst this year? I guess so, especially around the bitcoin/cryptocurrency hacks… Let’s see how this year goes. While I had this post in a draft, the complete MELTDOWN/SPECTRE security issues came to light… I am going to wait for next year to see the repercussions and what happened to mitigate and prevent this shitstorm. :)

Virtual reality was a disappointment for me last year, and I have not seen much improvements besides some new games and chat applications. I do not expect this year to bring anything new in this realm of technology.

Containers, containers… Containers! We have been seeing Kubernetes taking over the container space by storm. As a free tool to orchestrate the deployment of application containers on a cluster of servers and with a massive community, kubernetes will mostly be the de-facto orchestration tool for the cloud. I was able to give a little bit back to the community with some small commits to the LXD as I ‘promised’ in my last 2016 in review post.

This last year very productive for me in the container world and what I was able to achieve along with the team at Emesa. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to system containers and finalized a huge project which was the automated deployment of system containers to our developers. Now the developers at Emesa can do a single-click deploy of a development container which has all the tools and necessary settings for them to develop their applications. Full root access so that they can test and play around with new software and libraries as they want, and can delete and rebuild the container from scratch if needed. As an excellent reward for all of our efforts, I will give a talk about this project at FOSDEM. I feel very proud to be selected to give the talk and honored to be representing the Emesa team at such great conference.

On a more personal tone, this last year has been full of changes.

I have tried very hard to stop gaming and fill in that time with different things. This change has been a tough change for me, the ones who know me know that I have been very addicted to gaming, but I feel that finally, I can overcome it. Although I am feeling kind of a ‘hangover,’ as I still find myself wanting to play games, watching some videos about games and thinking “oh man I need to start playing again!”. I sense that I am on the right path as I do not play for a couple of months now and so far have been enjoying my time reading and learning new things.

Learning how to program better and learning new programming languages have never seen such priority from me as in 2017. I feel that I have made a ton of progress in this area and 2018 will be the year where I will spend way more of my time programming.

I have also been developing skills outside of the technology area as well, I have been cooking a lot of dishes and learning the correct cooking methods and having a blast while doing it. Now I can prepare a mean ‘Tagliatelle a la Bolognese’ and Lasagna. Developing these skills also allowed me to learn how to improvise and think about dishes on the spot by selecting only ingredients out of the refrigerator, although I always prefer to think and do a specific meal in advance. It is an excellent way to work my creativity and do something that does not require me to sit behind a screen - at least for a few hours.

And for next year these are the things that I do expect to see and happen.

Artificial intelligence although hyped and sometimes people will fantasize about super-smart robots which will dominate and overrule the humanity which I only think that it works only as a very good science fiction story, it will dominate how we use technology. Smart weapons which can find and kills targets precisely will be a huge point of discussion which started last year but I think this year will gain huge momentum. A lot of new products and services will make direct use of AI and directly coupled with AI; another big buzzword is Machine Learning. Every single company is making use of the data they gather about their customers and try to adapt the products and services they sell to the customer specific needs. Who holds more data and uses that data in a smarter way, holds more power.

I think this is going to be the year of the blockchain, more and more people are getting into it, more venture capital is being put into developing this technology. Bitcoin price has soared up from 1000$ to 15000$ in one year, and I wonder how big it will be by the end of the year? I bet 50000$.

Not much more predictions to make for next year, I just know that I will improve my self and be better than last year :) (cof that includes me trying to make more blog posts cof)

Wishes for a happy, healthy, and successful 2018 for all of you!