End leave...

15 January 2024 

The last day of my annual leave. I spent my 3 weeks with family, smoking cigars and sipping Speyside’s best 750ml offerings. The time before returning to work is normally the same, a sudden urge towards self-improvement, personally and professionally, and the usual attempts at planning the year ahead. 

I took a sneak peek at my mails, 18000 unread (a mixture of work, automated mailers, but mostly system-generated notifications of on-premises and cloud systems). I immediately closed it. I’ll deal with this tomorrow, 16 January. I’ll probably have to book a few hours just to go through the December and January mails and then officially kick-off this year. I dislike this activity upon returning to work. We’ll experience a tough one in 2024; digitalization, cloud, and important projects that need to close out. So, it’ll be a busy year and value will need to shine though. 

I also want to close out a few personal professional goals in 2024, these include: 

• Get a certification, I just don’t know which one. I’ve done all manner of Cloud-related training for Azure. I’m not big on certifications because I don’t like that they expire. Also, I have a large family, so study time will always be difficult. CompTIA’s Cloud+ seems a good all-round validation of my skills. I like it because it is vendor neutral yet addresses all aspects of the Cloud and its architecture.
• Build a solid CV. I haven’t updated mine in 3 years. Why update it? I don’t know, you know.
• Act more professional. I'm pretty easy-going professionally, but maybe it's time to dial it up a bit. Sometimes being too laid-back can be a blind spot. So, from tomorrow onwards, I'm dialing up the professionalism.

I kind of look forward to my return. All my colleagues and team members are back at work. Here’s to a successful professional 2024…