What I hope to achieve in 2024

I've been using AWS at work for about two years and feel I know my way around a fair number of its services, but there's a shed load in there I've never touched as AWS is enormous. I'm interested in doing more architectural work, so this feels like the natural place to focus.

The Associate Solutions Architect certification explores best use-cases, service limitations, costing and getting into the mindset of AWS's recommended architecture patterns.

An architect at my work mentioned that the SAA certification very much overlaps with AWS's developer certification, only this one leans more on theory and the other leans more on practical examples. That works for me, as I do plenty practical stuff through the day job and hobby projects!

He did also emphasise that this is all about AWS advocating for doing stuff in the AWS way. There'll be useful stuff that applies everywhere, but also stuff that is heavily AWS-centric.

I'm not expecting this to open any doorways in particular (job opportunities, or whatever), but to give me more insight and awareness in my current role.

I have a few motivations for this, but ultimately I just think it's an interesting tool that I want to know more! I'm in a kind-of-DevOps role at the moment, and feel having a better understanding of K8s can do me no harm! I'm not settings sights on certification or whatever - I just want to make use of it where I can.

I'm clearly going to have to dedicate some time and energy to upskilling in the machine learning and large language model space. I'm already getting involved in some of this stuff at work (very much on the fringe, for me at least). So, even if it's just increasing my knowledge and understanding (rather than being hands-on), I think time spent in this area is a must.

Opera dei Lumi took a haitus in 2023, for the first time since it was created. This was due to a number of things in my personal life (nothing bad!), but I want to bring this back into play. I have exciting plans for 2024!

Not including conducting engagements, I'm not as active musically as I would like and want to play some chamber music again. This was the centre of my musical upbringing and I definitely miss it. I'm hoping to get the viola out to start playing quartets again.

We've had a holding site up for over a year now. It was supposed to be a temporary thing. So I want to make an effort to put a proper, nice website up soon, as I feel guilty that it's been neglected.

I have a number of editions 'in progress'. I'd quite like to wrap some of them up - there should be a few easy wins to get completed (shorter works and/or works with fewer instruments). This will involve me doing a bit more SCORE again, or learning MuseScore/Dorico in more depth.