So today is the last day of the year, 2016 is coming to an end and 2017 is just a few hours away or to be accurate, it has already started in the eastern part of the world.
Since the last post, there has been a major change, the blog has been moved from WordPress.com to WordPress.org. This change allows more customization and challenges as compared to before. I have given a fresh look to my homepage: BilalHaider.com. Also, I am working to make my LinkedIn profile as the first stop for my technical profile. Since most of the stuff that I have been working on for past years is mostly internal corporate stuff which is not available for public display, I find LinkedIn very supportive in this situation. You can sneak peek my profile on https://sa.linkedin.com/in/bhaider or the easy to remember custom url: BilalHaider.com/linkedin
The blog has been silent for this whole year as there has been no post. Well, many factors contributed to it, including my procrastination. There have been less public events (in my city Jeddah) as compared to previous years as now the Webinar trend is on the rise. I remember back in 2011 Microsoft Saudi Arabia arranged a local session for the Live Webcast of Windows 8. I covered the session here: Windows 8 KeyNote – Build Event.
This year I have attended two local events. First one was organized in April by Veeam (or to be accurate by cTelecoms, their golden partner in KSA) with the collaboration of Microsoft SA. This is the only activity by Microsoft SA that I am aware of. The title of the event was Cloud Success with Microsoft & Veeam. You can read more about it on their page here.
The second event was organized in October by Oracle Middle East with the title of Oracle Cloud Applications Day. In this event, they tried to promote the newly released Cloud version of their popular suite. In the time of dropped sales nationwide (and globally), it was a well-presented event, not sure how much was the ROI (Return Of Investment) from it. You can read more about this here on Oracle Page.
Some of the activities that have kept me occupied mainly fall under the category of self-grooming. I have tried to learn new tools and technologies and sharpen the existing stuff to diversify my skill set. In 2017, I plan to practice these along with new stuff that I expect to acquire. this practice will be both in the line of work as well as in personal expeditions. Also, I hope I will be able to share some stuff on this blog. Wish you all a blessed and productive 2017.