My Year in Review - 2023 Edition

2023 in General

Once again, the year is over and I wanted to take some time to look back on what I accomplished during 2023, and what I am planning to do in 2024. Overall, I think the goals are quite achievable and I should have no issues with getting the things done that I want to get done.

I don’t have too many updates on the actual website, and I only ended up posting a few items in 2023. I did start several posts which I will continue to work on this spring, some of which are going to be posted on certain days to commemorate some events that are coming up. I also have several items ready to post on my companion website, but that will happen throughout the year as I get time to complete them.

I did release a new publication a few months ago, AD CS on Windows Server 2022 which was based on the same guide that I had also posted. I wasn’t really planning on even making it, but I ended up creating it anyways to complement the existing guides. At the same time, I also updated the Building a Certificate Authority in Windows Server 2019 guide to match the same formatting and fixed some minor issues. I do have a long term plan for these free guides, and I will talk more about that later this year.

I mentioned in a previous post that someone was plagiarising my Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - First Edition book on an online training website. The issue has been dealt with and the content was removed from the platform. Plagiarism has been brought up quite a lot lately, especially with the rise of tools like ChatGPT. I have also watched several YouTube videos on how some content creators have been caught plagiarising things as well in their videos.

It may seem odd to mention this, but the MacBook Air that I am currently using will be 3 years old in February 2024. I have zero intention of upgrading to a newer model and I think I can get another 2 years out of it unless something happens to it. I am extremely impressed with it, and I have zero complaints about it. It continues to impress me how well it still works after all this time. The same goes with my iPhone 12 Pro, even though the battery is starting to show its age.

Professional and Personal Life

I didn’t do as much travelling for work in 2023 as I have done in previous years, but I did end up travelling to Germany for work to meet the team that I currently work with. It was the first time I had ever been there, and I was lucky enough to do a bit of sightseeing while I was there:

I also got quite busy starting in July which lasted for the rest of the year and is what has taken up all my personal time. That started to ease slightly near the end of the year which has been nice, and now I have more time to get things done.

I did try something a bit different this year. I usually take the last 2 weeks of the year off, although in 2023 I only took a week due to running out of vacation time. Normally during that time, I try and cram in as much as possible for anything hobby related or working on other things. For once I didn’t work on anything or stress about anything, I just tried relaxing and visited friends and family. It was a good decision and I think I will keep doing that going forward.

2024 Goals

Back in 2022 I migrated my website for Ten Fifteen Solutions to Hugo and Netlify because I was tired of paying for hosting. Like I said before, it was not the best conversion ever and the site that is currently there is just a placeholder. I am going to spend some time working on it over the next few weeks. The deal I made with myself is that if I don’t have time to work on it, I will hire someone to update the website.

I have several posts that I am getting ready to publish on the website, one of which is a look at the backup strategy that I use for all my data. The other is a look back at the Skills Ontario and Skills Canada competitions that I competed in 15 years ago this May.

Something that I have been doing for the last 4 years was collecting retro games and consoles. I am planning a post on it since I wanted to share what I have experienced with this particular hobby, and what I would do differently if I could go back and start the process again. I also have an entire collection of retro computers that I have wanted to write things about, and I will try and get to some of those this year.

I also have a somewhat ambitious project that I want to start this year, and I am currently doing research for it. I’ll talk about it later this year once I get to a certain point with it.

Practical Guide to PKI with Windows Server - Second Edition

So, a quick update to this book. This is still happening, but as I said above I was quite busy during the last half of 2023, and I haven’t had much time to work on the book lately. It is nearly completed, and I have added everything that I wanted to add to it that never made the first edition.

Something that I am planning on doing a complete rewrite on two of the chapters. I sent the book to a few people for feedback, and they were very upfront about two of the chapters having structure problems. The actual content was fine, but the chapters need some reworking.

I also mentioned in my post about the plagiarism issues that I experienced with my first book that I was going to create my own online training course once I complete the second edition of the book. I have the equipment that I need to create the course and I have worked on a course outline that I will be using. I’ll post more about that once I get close to completing it.