Welcome to another retrospective. As you might have noticed, it’s been a while since I last wrote one. The reason for this is simple: In the last few months I’ve been focusing on my studies, doing courses and tiny projects to test out what I learned. This lead to a situation where I didn’t have much to write about beyond “I’ve been learning a lot”. Now that the year is ending, however, it felt like a good time to recap all of the things I’ve been doing.

Moving forward, retrospectives will move away from the monthly format, and instead will come whenever I have something meaningful to write about.

Now, let’s look at what I’ve been studying these past few months.

Linux

Starting this period, I knew I wanted to get more into the Backend and DevOps side of things. My understanding of Linux didn’t go beyond basic commands, and I felt it necessary to learn more about it.

To that end, I did a couple of online courses and practices, and gathered enough experience to feel comfortable dealing with common operations of Backend or DevOps developers.

Go

With this goal of getting more into the Backend, I decided to really learn Go. I had already done a couple of projects with it, but I didn’t quite understand how it worked under the hood. I went through the official documentation and their recommended resources, and I’m glad to say that I’ve learned a lot and am now comfortable with the language.

API Design

Another aspect of Backend I wanted to learn more about was API design. I’ve designed quite a few APIs by now, but I never got a proper guide on how they should be structured. I followed Google’s guidelines; a lot of it was common sense, but I still gained some valuable insights.

Patterns

In a similar vein, I wanted to learn more about design patterns. This is something I felt would improve my code, from writing more efficient components, improving the structure of my codebases, and so on. In the end it was a mixed bag, since a lot of the patterns I learned have already been adopted and integrated by the frameworks I use, but I learned a lot of why things are the way they are.

DevOps with Docker and Kubernetes

Onto the DevOps side of things. The University of Helsinki offers great courses online, many of which I had already taken. I started “DevOps with Docker” a long time ago but never finished it, so that was my first priority. It is a really complete and challenging course. I probably don’t know all there is to know about Docker, but I feel comfortable writing somewhat complex Dockerfiles and managing containers.

After that, I started “DevOps with Kubernetes”, the natural progression from the previous one. It was a bit more challenging for me, because I had never used Kubernetes before, but in the end I got quite comfortable with Kubernetes and everything surrounding it.

AWS

Lastly, and still ongoing, I’ve been going through the AWS Developer Learning Plan. So far, I’ve learned about S3, DynamoDB, Lambda, API Gateway, and a lot of other things. There is a lot of filler content, so it has been a bit of a slog, but I am still learning a lot about AWS and its services.