As for everyone else, the last year derailed much of our plans. After GitLab Commit I planned to start a course company with a friend, but as the plan was largely based on an on-premise performance, we’ve put it on hold. Also my work for a big energy company took all of my remaining time as I started to work fulltime for them last year. Good news is that I have learned a great deal, everyone is healthy at home and my wife has an interesting new job!

For years my internet provider was XS4ALL, which started in the ’90s from a small hacker group and was one of the first providers in the Netherlands. It has always been a provider with a strong ethical background. The Church of Scientology sued XS4all in the past for not wanting to take unwanted information about them offline, and the internet provider has often acted proactively due to privacy issues. In the early 2000s, KPN bought the company, but the brand and organization still survived, and they have kept it alive until last year.

Aonther reason why it took some time to create new blogposts is because during the last month a carefully devised plan has taken root! Together with Wijnand Top I am starting the [C]I/CD training Academy](https://cicd-academy.com/)! We believe that Agile in general and especially CI/CD concept are misunderstood in big organizations and we can help making it work.

IIt took a while since my last post, but there was so much to process! Having visited San Francisco after half a week of touristic sightseeing, the GitLab Commit buzz started to fizz at the speakers' dinner. The actual day started early with a walk down market street, passing the Twitter headquarters and Uber HQ on my left side conspicuously. Being part of the Agile Transformation track, I stayed most of the day at presentations given by my fellow track mates.

In preparation for my talk at GitLab Commit, I have asked several people about their experiences with GitLab in larger organizations. It seems it is installed in a lot of cases by developers or system administrators themselves, creating a grassroots movement pushing CI/CD. If you are using GitLab in your company, what are your experiences? I would love to hear from you and created a questionnaire. It is anonymous, and the data won’t be used commercially.

One of my dreams has come true! I am going to San Francisco in California! And also for an excellent reason. I am allowed to deliver a talk at GitLab Commit in January 2020! The talk will be about the easy acceptance of GitLab in startup culture versus the more tough environment of the enterprise. GitLab is very popular on the internet and has an excellent reputation amongst developers. The CI feature has been ranked as top of it’s class.

The last couple of years I have teached some Minecraft and Scratch programming at the elementary school my kids are attending. Together with one of the other fathers I am trying a new concept today. Let’s see if we can teach them to build basic websites. I have found some great courses at Skillsdojo and we will use those. Update: It was a great succes! We have learned the kids how to create a basic html page with paragraph and header tags, images and video embedding.

Now that my book has been published I have more time to think. It crossed my mind today that my earliest encounter with GitLab was in 2014, when we needed an on-premise git server, and preferably open-source. GitHub was already very popular back then. I remember how smoothly the install was using the Omnibus installer. We were with only 4 developers, and we did not even use issue management or any kind of CI for that matter.

After more than a year of hard work (besides the daily job), my book about GitLab has been published! Somewhere in the summer of 2018, a publisher approached me with the question, ‘Can you write a book about GitLab for us?’ At that time, we were migrating GitLab to a private cloud at the ING bank. I had a lot of inspiration for explaining how to scale GitLab in a corporate environment.

So, this is 2019. What is changing for me? Wel.. I am not going to spill al of my life over here, but I am planning to blog more. I totally agree with Jaron Lanier that the current social media are flawed. They are based on the ‘freemium’ model using adverts. He argues they are not ‘social’ anymore as we tend to see them but they have become ‘behavioral modification empires’.