Summing up 2020

By Gal Zaidman ,  01 January 2021

Now that we are in the middle of our third quarantine in Israel and can’t go out to celebrate the new year, my girlfriend suggested that we should have a nice romantic dinner, open a bottle of wine and try to sum up all of our achievements both personal and professional in 2020 and our hopes for 2021.

So yesterday when we set down on the sofa after a great dinner and half a bottle of wine, we started talking and I understood how many positives we managed to get from this crazy year.

For me 2020 was filled with personal and professional growth, yes there was social isolation, lost of trust in the government, and so much craziness but let’s try to focus on the positives.

On the personal side:

  • I’ve bought a record player and started a record collection, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for years.

  • I started my own software blog, it’s not much and I don’t update it as frequently as I want to but since I consider developing software a hobby not only a profession it is something I have wanted to do for a long time.

  • I improved my mixology skills, I always loved making cocktails and since I did a bartending course in 2014 I always played with it. But the fact that all the bars are closed made me step up my game, my home bar is way more diverse and I started managing all my favorite cocktail recopies in google slides.

On the professional side:

  • Contributed my project to Fedora/RHEL - I started porting the oVirt virtio-win drivers installer to open-source technologies in 2019 but on April 2020 it was released as part of the virtio-win package in Fedora/RHEL. That means that from being a small part of RHV/oVirt it is now available for all red hat costumers, fedora users, and for everyone. Link

  • Published my first academic article - published an article I wrote together with Boris Morose and Sabina Aledort, It started as the final project of my software engineering degree and evolved to a real academic article. “Strategic Behavior Discovery of Multi-agent Systems Based on Deep Learning Technique” published in the book SAI 2020: Intelligent Computing and indexed to DBLP, ResearchGate, Google Scholar, and Springerlink. Link

  • Openshift on RHV/oVirt - In 2020 I’ve joined the Openshift on top of RedHat Virtualization (oVirt) project, in which we essentially made RHV an official OpenShift provider. I’m currently one of the main developers in the project, and it was the best thing I could hope for. I learned so much:

    • Ansible, Terraform, Container technologies, Kubernetes and Openshift, bash, Python and Golang.
    • Gained experience troubleshooting complex distributed systems and CI environments.
    • Developing an agile and fast-growing product, supporting 3 release cycles in less than a year!
    • Working with customers, support, and product management.
    • Collaborated with amazing and talented people from all over the world on open source projects.

    And there is so much more to do in 2021 :)

  • Mentored developers - I had the huge privilege of mentoring and onboarding new software engineers joining our team, with different knowledge levels and departments, from intern to senior, on DEV or QE, I learned so much and enjoyed every minute.

  • Talked in Conferences:

    • Computing Conference 2020: Gave a talk at Computing Conference 2020 about the article “Strategic Behavior Discovery of Multi-agent Systems Based on Deep Learning Technique”
    • oVirt conference 2020: Gave a talk at oVirt conference 2020 “Windows VMs on oVirt 4.4, what’s new?” Link

  • Completed RHCE Certification (RedHat Certified Engineer)- My second certification from RedHat, focused on Ansible and RHEL8 system administration.

  • Promoted to Senior Software Engineer - As of 1th of January, I’m officially a Senior Software Engineer at RedHat :)

This is my list of achievements, as for my hopes I’ll keep them on for myself for now :)

From summing up this crazy year I learned that we adapt to changes and grow from them, when the work from home started I hated it and now I learn to appreciate the benefits of it and enjoy it. I wish that in 2021 we will take all that we have learned from 2020 and apply it to the normal life we know and love. Last but not least to I want to thank all the amazing people at RedHat and my wonderful girlfriend Shahf ben Jakov for successfully sharing a 45 meter apartment with me and everything else <3.

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