My 2013 Year in Review

Since January seems to be the time for reflection, and looking forward, I'll oblige and review the major milestones I had for 2013 and then see if I can learn anything from it all.

The year began with a compressed timeline to set up a new hosting site, the SharePoint environment we had in one hosting center needed to be recreated in another as we had to move data centers to a new provider.  Basically I spent two months prior to the end of the year, and most of January 2013 getting the environment ready, this provided some much needed updates to the existing scripts and documentation we used to be able to create these environments.  There were some mistakes in setting up the environment, I know now the best way NOT to update IIS redirects, and have much more experience with those under my belt.  In February we brought the site up and live, with some delay as the method I was using to copy over files that were needed for various apps was not completing properly and with some work with the IT guys we got that worked out.

Of course that hosting site lasted about two months until we started getting issues with up time, even having a 36 hour site downtime due to the center trying to update their disc software for the virtual machines.  I am not a hardware guy but apparently the disk update did not go well and brought down everything on that disk for a day and a half, we got reports for the first 6 hours or so then nothing until the site came up.  We knew it was up before they called us.

So another site move happened!  This one was much smoother and with the documentation updated it went much better.  Still two in one year,quite a feat!

All through the year I am also updating the Automation Framework that runs the Regression Tests, Feature Tests, and Acceptance Tests I have in place.  This is a Selenium setup with Web Driver, SpecFlow to utilize some BDD, driven with PowerShell scripts and written within Visual Studio so I get some experience coding in C#.  It's a nice framework and has had some awesome improvements and abstraction added, I'd like to do some more but have not had a chance yet.

I completed my O'Reilly online course in JavaScript programming, I learned a lot in that and am still amazed that I passed considering that I think my own programming skills are subpar.  I have learned how better to structure my code, and have improved my own Test Framework with abstraction and reading from external data files so its easier to update information when our site has changes.

With the PowerShell scripts that we have for our Build and Deploy network I have added some improvements and also am planning a PowerShell 3 update for 2014.  I've already worked out some serious issues with the changes and how we will deal with them, I just need to test for them and then begin implementation.

There is a site redesign coming, so I need to adjust my Test Framework, determine how to deal with changing existing redirects to new locations and also add new ones for people looking for information from the outside.  Should be fun!

All in all a good year and I have some interesting work coming up in 2014 with log scanning for people trying to access some information on our site that is ONLY tracked in our IIS files, since the data is on our secondary site that is not under Google Analytics tracking.  Can't wait!