True story: my goal this year was to post here weekly or bi-weekly. I chronicled my intention to score the Cloud Native Foundation’s Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) certification in early January. I loaded that post with more intent to write about the journey than ever. I had a spreadsheet for tracking my efforts; I was going to post about my experiences frequently, the whole nine.
Then this happened…
As I’m sitting here writing this post, I can’t help but laugh as I look at timestamps of these two events. I wrote my triumphant CKA post on Jan. 21st. The LinkedIn message was received Jan. 22nd. Clearly, from the title of this post, I chose to give the book a shot. I can honestly say since committing to the project, it has consumed more than 80% of anything I could have remotely considered spare or free time. While I didn’t keep track of hours, I would estimate somewhere between 200 and 250 hours have cumulatively gone into the effort. As of this evening, I have finished responding to feedback from the editors. I felt so good about being finished writing something (the book) that I decided to write something else (this blog post). Here’s a link to the pre-order listing on Amazon if you’re interested (and I hope you are)!
The moral of the story is as you’d expect: if an opportunity comes along in life, take it. The last eight months have seen me drive my wife up the wall with my constant complaining about having to work on this book every evening, every weekend. I came to the point about a month ago where I was over it. I was about to write the editor and tell them to forget it because I had no intention of finishing it. And of course, she didn’t let me quit (because she’s fantastic). I have no idea whether people will like it, love it, or hate it. Honestly, at this point, I can’t say I’m as concerned about critical acclaim as I am about the fact that I stuck it out and finished it up.