All Of Ethan’s Podcasts And Articles For August 2017

Here’s a catalog of all the media I produced (or helped produce) in August 2017.

In August, I finished my contributions to this book. I ended up with roughly 6 (or 7?) chapters out of 30 or so. That’s a little awkward for me as I would have hoped to have done a more or less 50/50 split, but when I’d signed up for the project, the original plan was for a 2 year writing period. It was compressed to 7 months. I did what I could, and struggled even to squeeze out what I did. The scope also grew from something less than 20 chapters to over 30. Plus we had a couple of authors back out of their planned contributions. I wasn’t really able to pick up that slack. Russ White was able to, somehow. I assume he views sleeping as optional.
The publisher has been aggressive about getting the book ready to go to print. My co-author and the primary author, Russ White, has taken on essentially all of these post-writing tasks, handling author reviews, and so on. The process is rather convoluted, so I’ve been told.
I don’t have an official publication date as yet, but in theory, this mighty networking tome will be available in early 2018.

This felt like a somewhat challenged month for my productivity. I didn’t have enough focus on any one thing. That’s evidence of being pulled in too many different directions. And that means I said “yes” to too much.
As a company, we spent a good bit of time working on the backend of PacketPushers.net. After the web site transition was completed in July, there were inevitable pieces to pick up. That was in the form of pages that needed clean up, some HTML we’d blown up inadvertently, and general organization. Unseen work that takes time.
I started on AWS training using course material from acloud.guru. So far, I think the material is very good, but I need to devote more time to it.
I attended the HPE launch event for the Aruba 8400 chassis switch, which was a trip out to the west coast and back to the east coast spread over three days.
I attended VMworld US 2017 as well as VMware’s future:net mini-conference inside of VMworld. That was a trip to Vegas and back spread over several days. It was utterly exhausting, loaded with sessions and vendor briefings. Absolutely wall to wall. I remain dubious about the overall value of conferences in the Internet age.
I took off a long weekend for a mini-vacation to ride large roller coasters at Busch Gardens in Virginia with family. My favorite coaster was Tempesto. Five stars. Would recommend.