Failing to Start
I'm at a point in my career, and life in general where I find myself failing to start.
To start the side project, or business or venture. I started a blog a couple years back to document and log the various tech things I'd work on. I then added to the technical blog with my thoughts & musings on my career in I.T., and the experiences I've had.
But despite the things I've done, there's a lot more that I wanted to do, but have always found some reason not to pull the trigger. So, its now 2020,and I'm going to start.
I was going to say "easier said than done", but I think that's the problem, its easier said when our "definition of done" is outlandishly unrealistic.
Starting is as easy as "just starting".
Done. You've started.
Document versus Create
Love him or hate him, over the last 4-5 years I've listened to a lot of Gary Vee aka Gary Vaynerchuk.
Gary is a businessman, pure-bred entrepreneur, hustler and over-all motivational person.
But one piece of content in particular (and he makes a sh*t-load, daily), that really resonated with me in the context of "failing to start" was the idea of "Document versus create".
But I'll let Gary explain it in his own words:
And that's what I want to do. Just document what I'm trying to do.
"But Ron, what are you trying to do?"
I Want to Build Clouds
I want to build production-grade, security-hardened, observable cloud infrastructure for startups and small-to-medium businesses with applications they want a fully operational production environment for.
And I want to get at least 1 x paying customer this year.
I'm not even sure this is a good way to spend my time, and I don't know what this turns into, but I guess that's why the "Document versus Create" helps just get on and doing something rather than endlessly debate it in my head.
The Age of the Internet
This is the age of the internet and while this can mean our hopes, dreams, mistakes, successes and failures can be immortalized online forever searchable and probably cringe-worthy given enough time.
The internet also means we have access to knowledge, expert help, community and opportunity - like having a blog to get the word out, and document the journey for posterity.
The Start of the Journey
I'm going to work on and share my experiences with building these real-world cloud infrastructures with all the functionality and features that are in demand in the real world. Things like RBAC-integrated clusters, mTLS service meshes and Pod Security Policies.
Already Started
Actually if we're being 100% transparent here, what prompted me to think about starting this post was the work I'm already doing on this "cloud infrastructure" project.
This was the screenshot that made me think "Yay! got it working... and no blog to share it on..."
This is a 10 x microservice polyglot application that Google use to demo the power of the Google Kubernetes Engine and I had just finished porting all 10 x services to helm.sh and got it all working.
I'll share the experiences here, on LinkedIn and probably Twitter