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Sarah Lean 🏴󠁧󠁢
Sarah Lean 🏴󠁧󠁢

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Looking back at 2022

It's time to look back and reflect on what 2022 has been like.

There's been some notable changes and achievements for me career wise this year.

Career

At the start of 2022 I was a Senior DevOps Advocate at Octopus Deploy. I threw myself into the role and that enthusiasm was rewarded when I was promoted to Lead DevOps Advocate at Octopus in the later part of the year.

I was honoured to become a member of programs and recognised for my community contributions.

In April 2022, I was awarded the Microsoft MVP award. This was an award that saw me recognised for all the community work I had been involved in.

August 2022 saw another program recognise the enthusiasm and passion I have for the Lenovo ThinkPad laptops and was invited to become a Lenovo INsider.

The Redgate 100 was released in September 2022. It was truly special to be in amongst the list.

Awards

October 2022 saw me invited to join the GitKraken Ambassador program.

But the biggest change for me was in November, as I re-joined Microsoft.

Throughout the year I had started to miss talking to customers, hearing their challenges, trying to solve them and guide them. And realised I needed to get back to that.

So, I am back at Microsoft as a Cloud Solution Architect, and I am truly happy and loving my job!

Video

I started properly investing in my YouTube channel back in 2019, it was something I started to get more comfortable talking to the camera. Initally that saw me doing a weekly update video. Where I shared news information and thoughts on what was happening in the community and industry.

In December 2021 I stopped doing those updates though. Instead, I have started doing videos answering questions or summarising large events and the news from them.

The one thing I have shared this year regarding my channel is that it isn’t monetized. Everything you see on my channel is done in my spare time and at my own expense and I receive no payment for those videos. I don’t earn money from YouTube, which means every like, every comment, every subscriber, every share means the world to me.

Blogging

It’s funny looking back at the previous “year in review” blog posts and reading what I did. In 2021 I wrote over 170 blogs! That’s madness, I can’t believe I did that!

This year I wrote 70+ blogs. Less, but by no means less quality. I’ve been more strategic about the blogs I have written and thought more about making them valuable. This decision was driven by the things I learnt in Dom Kent’s “How To Write Blog Posts That Get 500,000 Views” course.

Social Media

Social media has become a confusing medium. Over the years it's been at the center of me meeting new people within the IT community, opening up opportunities for me and been a centre of fun. But lately it's become an all consuming medium. A medium with lots of positives and also one with negatives.

I have accounts on:

And I've started to find myself spending less and less time on these platforms with all the negativity around them, and especially Twitter.

I hope in 2023 things are much more positive and we can all get back to being the amazing community that I found a number of years ago.

2022 has been a year of challenges, changes and adventures, here’s to whatever 2023 brings!

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