Year in Review: 2018 Catch Up

The past few years since joining Rock Solid Knowledge have been a bit of a blur. I’ve gone from living in a small flat in Cornwall with no central heating, sat all year in a small office of 3, to being married, living in a city, and becoming sick of flying.

I know I’ve accomplished a lot these past few years, but I still seem to feel like I’m not moving fast enough or that someone will eventually discover me for the fraud that I am.

So, to combat this feeling, and since my wife keeps telling me that I should share what I do more often, I’m going to publicly take stock of the past couple of years and think about what I want from 2019. In true social media fashion, I’m going to only discuss the positives, but obviously there were some lows; however, those are private.

Hopefully, this will be useful for me to review again in 2020.

What’s Happened since 2016

In the mad rush since 2016, I have:

• Got married
• Moved to Bristol
• Visited 11 different countries
• Flown on 43 flights
• Turned down money in favor of happiness
• Spoken at 7 major conferences and 5 user groups
• Released 3 Pluralsight courses

Sure, some of those stats are chump change compared to other speakers or consultants or Pluralsight authors, but I’m proud of what I’ve achieved.

The Current State of scottbrady91.com

Since I created this website in 2015, it’s had a steady increase in traffic. There have been no moments of fame, but rather organic growth.

Since creating this site, I’ve written 56 articles and released a simple tool for parsing SAML messages. My most popular content has been around IdentityServer, with the more general theory around OAuth and OpenID Connect a close second.

This year, I’ll be focussing on the OAuth and OpenID Connect theory again, but also around general user authentication. The odd ASP.NET Core article will always pop up, I’m sure.

Check out identityserver.com for some of my other IdentityServer related content.

Top 5 Articles So Far

2018 in Pictures

Other highlights include:

• Bombing around the icy lanes of St. Andrews, Scotland in a rear-wheel drive Jaguar
• Drinking too many stouts
• Attending an identity conference for the first time

Plans for 2019

Of course, no plan survives contact with the enemy, but this is what I would like to achieve outside of working hours:

• Get halfway through the cryptopals challenges - even set 1 has been kicking my ass
• Lay off the imperial stouts - because I’ve gotten fat(ter) and my untappd statistics are embarrassing
• Buy a house - the big one that’s been in the planning for a while
• Travel only when necessary - fewer conferences, more quality time with the wife
• Write at least one blog post a month - that’s all you’re getting from me. This one doesn’t count
• Read The Imposter's Handbook - because I was a crap academic
• Redesign my article layout - sidebars are so last year
• Update the UI of IdentityManager2 - taking ownership of the UI code and simplifying UI customization

Happy New Year. We hope you have a good one!