Nothing published this month - Did I stop learning?

Last night when I apply for the 2016 VMware vExpert program, I realized that I did not publish for the month of November.  This is the exact opposite of November 2014 where I participated in the “30 blog in 30 days”.

If you read the description of this blog, it said – “A blog to share security, networking and cloud related technology information as @vCloudernBeer picked up on his search for his destiny in the cloud”.    

Well does it mean that I did not pick up anything this month?  

That's correct, the answer is NO (double negative). 

What have I done?

Actually, I am learning more and thus I do not have time to write.  Blogging is important and it helps me to truly understand a given subject.  And it is fun to write and to share ideas, knowledge or experiences to the community.  It is for sure a win situation for me and I hope it is also a win-win situation for me and my audiences.

Another reason that I did not publish any post this month is that being a software developer for networking equipment, I am trying to find a job that is cloud related.  There are so many things/skill to pick up and I figure that I have “talked” enough and it is time for me to “do something”.  I need to work on some project and I need to be proficient in using GitHub for open source project collaboration.

I told my wife, to contribute to open source in my situation is just like trying to learn how to play a musical instrument from YouTube.  Everyone has the impression that it is open source and you just dig in and look at source code and then contribute.  What I have found is that understanding the code and even to make changes is not so difficult since I am a software developer.  What I found difficult is to create a testing environment to test my changes.  Unit testing is very important for software developers.  I am a true support of “Test Driven Development” methodology.  In practice I may not be able to follow this TDD methodology but I try to test my code as through as possible.  It is very important for me to create a test environment. I need to pick up more operator skill to augment my software development skill.

Instead of writing, I tried to follow the step-by-step guide that is available on the web and try to create for myself test environment for different projects.  I ran into equipment problems where I found that my home lab is not quite ready to create a stable open source development and testing environment.  This weekend, I will be converting my Dell T-110 that has 16 GB of RAM running Windows 10 from a hard disk to SSD.  After that conversion I am going to duel boot this machine with Windows and Ubuntu 14.04.   Well, 16.04 is coming and I better get my environment up and running soon.

Commitmas

In the month of December, I will not be publishing blog post much because I will be participating in a community driven event - #commitmas in which I will learn along with the community on how to be more proficient in using GitHub.  If you are interested also, take a look here and consider joining this community event either to learn, to teach or both at the same time.

vBrownBag (as always) is nice enough to host a series of special podcasts on different aspects or pro-tips of using GitHub.  I will be giving a presentation Dec 30 - Bringing it all Together - Intro to Go. And do join me and see how I did in presentation a boring subject.  You can register for the podcast here.