2012 – A Year of CHANGE

What a remarkable year! I call it a year of change for me. Honestly for me 2012 was a testament of my change agility. So much happened this year in my personal and professional life that is why I consider it as a  year of new beginning, year of decisions, year of love, year of excitement, year of responsibility, and a year of learning. With the help of this post, I tell you how!

I would like to share some of the major highlights of this year with you (reader). Hope you had a splendid time in 2012 as well.

Change in Personal Life

Got Married

The year started with a fabulous adventure of getting married, well at least it’s fabulous in the beginning for everyone. It was the first big change of the year. Getting married is really a different yet good experience. Bachelor life is full of freedom in a sense that you are not bound to care for someone looking forward to you and you can hangout with pals till late without bothering for a second. Having said that married life comes with its own plus points which are definitely beyond the scope of this blog post 😀 So this was the first big change of this year.

Relocation

Next, I was offered Full Time Employment (FTE) at Telenor and the position required me to relocate to Islamabad. It’s is a beautiful city with lot of greenery. Relocation is challenging in a way that you leave your friends, family, home etc. but I guess in life one must be open for new opportunities, new places and new people. Though I think that I underestimated the impact of relocation and thought it would be easy but it took almost a quarter to know about the new city and adjust. Today after 6 months, I am fairly adjusted in new city and new workplace but I definitely miss my home town, friends, family and the hangout. This was the second big change of this year occurred in Q2-2012.

New family member

The third and perhaps the biggest change of the year, we were blessed with a baby girl. It’s a unique and indescribable feeling being a father and I love the time spent with my daughter especially when she is in good mood. Besides it’s difficult to overcome the situation when she cry for “difficult to discover” reasons. I honestly hope that I play a better husband and father role.

Change in Professional Life

Mobile Development

For the last 5 years, I have been working on Microsoft .NET platform both web and desktop. With new role at Telenor, there was an exciting change at workplace as well. We started developing mobile applications or rather building mobile apps eco-system in house. So I jumped in other platforms as well especially Android/Java. At the moment we are working on Web APIs, Android and iOS with my major time spent on writing code in Java. Though some percentage of my time is still spend on ASP.NET and C#. I still admire C# and VS environment.

Achievements

Fourth time awarded as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional

Really excited to get recognized by Microsoft fourth time in streak as Microsoft Most Valuable Professional.This award is given to technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others. I would like to thank everyone who contributed in supporting me.

If you want to know about MVP Award and how become one, you can read one of my blog post on “How to become Microsoft Most Valuable Professional

Imagine Cup Evaluation

In April, I was honored to be invited as one of the regional judges to evaluate Imagine Cup entries. It was a great experience and I was glad to see the potential of our students. I have also published some tips for students willing to participate in global competitions such as Imagine Cup. [link]

Certification

A lot happens this year but in the end I was able to clear one recent certification published in 2012. Last Day of the year ends with earning credential of “Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Specialist“. Read out why I think this area is important. [link]

My Aspirations for 2013

A Balanced Life

I truly aspire to live a balance life. Work, friends, family, learning, faith, and community all must be balanced and any aspiration in one of the area must be achieved in a balance way. By balance I mean giving right proportion of time and attention. But I am not saying that I got this and I need to work on this seriously. In past, I have spent a lot of time on technical stuff and I love it but I guess we have to consider other things along as well.

Open Source or Hobby Project

I am planning to take out some time for hobby project. There are no such concrete plans right now but with the recent hype of apps marketplace there are plenty of opportunity to come up with something of our own.

Excel in Software Engineering

In the past 5 years I have learned much in the industry but software engineering is a diversified yet evolving field with a lot of learning. Not only you have to keep up the pace to learn new technologies but also you have to learn best practices and patterns. I still believe there is a lot lot to learn and I still feel like newbie in the field. I really aspire to achieve excellence in the discipline.

That is all for now. Wish you a very best 2013.

Cheers,
Adil
P.S. What are your Aspirations?