2018 was not bad at all. Here are some of the major achievements and events of last year. Quite a few things happened during the last year.

• After I bought a 4K TV, I finally got my XBOX One X as there was a great deal at Amazon. Finally, I was able to fully utilize my TV.
• In February, I started teaching Interactive Systems and MCI at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Karlsruhe. It looks like the course went quite well as the University decided to offer it a second time during the autumn where I gave the lecture a second time. As a fun fact, they forgot to tell me until I got a note some days before the course was scheduled.
• In May I started teaching a second lecture covering data structures and algorithms, also at the Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Karlsruhe which will be given annually.
• As a result of the lecture, I started to write a book covering this topic using .NET Core. However, I am afraid I won’t be able to finish it in 2019.
• I also was appointed as a member of the examination board of Baden-Württemberg Cooperative State University in Karlsruhe where I advised two students writing their bachelor thesis.
• Also in May, I became a certified Product Manager after becoming a Certified Scrum Product Owner in 2017. The course, given by Product Focus based in London, UK is highly recommended.
• Our son celebrated his very first birthday and started walking this year. Not really my personal achievements but something you are proud of as a dad.
• In September we switched from HomeKit to Amazon Alexa and changed meanwhile almost all our Lights to Hue and IKEA TRÅDFRI.
• There is only a little I was able to achieve in my day job, however, our team managed to finish a five-year multi-million migration.
• As some side projects, I started learning Ansible as well as Docker and moved my 10-year-old handcrafted, homebrewed server to the latest generation of automated container based version.
• I also started again blogging, especially about my experiences with Docker, Ansible and further Automation.
• Unfortunately, our rabbits died by the rabbit hemorrhagic disease. Actually, this was a rather sad event. The vaccine is not easily available for this particular and very variant of the virus. It was an event I learned a lot about vaccines, viruses as well as diseases at all.
• Also, it seems as we experienced one of the longest droughts in Germany. We did not have any rain for weeks or even months.
• In December, I was appointed at a teaching assignment of Software Engineering of Complex Systems at the University of Heilbronn. I will start this lecture in February ’19 as well as a lab covering software development. I am really looking forward for these new courses.
• All over the year, I suffered from overall sleep deficiency. I wish I would know where our 16mo takes his energy from.
• One highlight was definitely visiting my former manager and old friend from Microsoft Research who meanwhile is head of a university.
• Eventually, I started using Twitter again.

Although I thought 2018 was a rather boring year, it looks as there was a lot going on. Unfortunately, I was not able to read that many books as I am used to, but his might change in 2019. So I am looking forward to an exciting next year and many new things to learn.