Phew! I’m not sorry to say that #vDM30in30 is over with! Not to say it wasn’t a lot of fun, but honestly, it’s a lot of work – especially when juggling family, travel, the day job and all! One might think that simply blasting out 30 pieces of content in 30 days would be relatively easy – but it’s not! That said, I learned a lot about my writing process and styles during this challenge, and as my final, and, unfortunately only 28th post of the month I’d like to share those with you…
The challenge of topics
It’s not easy coming up with topics to write about, especially when writing so often. I was lucky enough to have had a handful of ideas already sitting in my draft folders – and #vDM30in30 finally gave me the opportunity to write about them. That said, I know I had thought of more throughout the month and simply forgot to write them down. So whatever your means of tracking your ideas are (drafts, post-its, bullet journals) write them down! I found that if I didn’t commit it to something I would forget it. Needless to say I have a dozen or so topics just sitting in my drafts now – which leads me to the next challenge…
The challenge of time
Surely this is probably the biggest hurdle of all – finding the time to articulate yourself and get a blog post written. I find that this varies for me – for some topics I’ll simply start writing and have a complete post hashed out in an hour or so. Others I find myself having to go do research, read other blogs, whitepapers, trying to fully understand what I’m writing about 🙂 Those are the ones that sometimes take days – 10 minutes here and there, revisiting the same ol’ things. For me I’m best to dedicate all the time I need to write the post in one sitting – otherwise I have a hard time reading my own writing once I revisit the post. That said, time is tricky thing to find – we have families, commitments, other things we need to take care of – what I did was always critique myself with what I was doing. If I was watching a habs game I would try and at least do something “blog productive” while doing so. Those endless hours on an airplane – perfect for editing and getting things ready! My advice here, just use your time wisely and don’t sacrifice the things you love the most just to write a blog post – the kids will eventually go to sleep – do it then 🙂
The challenge of writing
Perhaps this is the oddest hurdle to overcome. Sometimes the words just come, other times I struggle trying to explain myself. There were times where, even though I knew I would have a hard time coming back to complete a post I simply had to walk away. If you are burnt out, nothing will make sense. Take breaks, either small or large – we are all different just find what works for you. For me, that was walking…
So I’m happy to say that even though I was two shy of the infamous thirty – I did learn some things about my writing process and styles. With that said, here’s a look at what I accomplished throughout the month of November on mwpreston.net.
Tech Field Day 12 Stuff
- The Atlas File System – The Foundation of the Rubrik Platform
- A VMware guys perspective on containers
- Scaling storage with an army of ARM
- Cohesity brining secondary storage to Tech Field Day
- DellEMC will make its first appearance at a Field Day event since merger
- Intel to take the stage at Tech Field Day
- Rubrik to talk cloud data management at Tech Field Day
- Docker to make 4th Field Day appearance
- Igneous bringing the cloud to you at Tech Field Day
- DriveScale set to make first ever Tech Field Day appearance
- StorageOS to take the stage at Tech Field Day
My favorite Veeamy things…
- Did you know there is a Veeam User Group?
- Does Veeam Backup from Storage Snapshot make things faster?
- Setting yourself up for success with Veeam Pre-Job scripts.
- VMCE Study guide – Module 10 Veeam ONE Reporting
- VMCE Study Guide – Module 10 Veeam ONE Dashboards
- VMCE Study Guide – Module 9 – Tape Device Support
Other vendor stuff
- VembuHIVE – A custom built file system for data protection
- Vembu BDR in the Lab – Part 1 – Backup
- Vembu BDR in the Lab – Part 2 – Recovery
- PowerShell Modules – Why Bother?
My Friday Shorts
- Friday Shorts – VeeamON, Storage Protocols, REST, and Murica!
- Friday Shorts – VMware, Veeam, Docker, and Community
Randoms
- She said I’m Tragically Hip
- Stanley Cups, Storage & Flash at the Toronto VMUG
- Not to be bragidocious – but the Stanley Cup will be at the Toronto VMUG.
- Another go around at #vDM30in30
- And of course, this post you are reading now 🙂
So there you have it! Thanks all for following along and reading and I hope to participate next year as well. All that said, don’t expect a post per day to continue here – I need some sleep!
