Wednesday, January 02, 2019

2019 New Year updates

A new year. A few updates.

In 2018, for the second year in a row, I published a book. How Open Source Ate Software with Apress. Buy early, buy often as the saying goes. If I do anything along these lines in 2019, it will probably be a mini-book about the lessons we can take away from Intel’s Itanium processor that I followed closely while an analyst. I’ve written an outline and we’ll have to see if I get the energy to do something more.

In part because of my open source book, this blog has been a bit inactive of late. I’ve also been publishing in a number of other places, including opensource.com, The Enterprisers Project, and TechTarget. I plan to continue doing so but I’m going to try to get back into the swing of jotting down quick thoughts here—related to both professional interests and otherwise. (I had planned to kick off a separate travel and food blog last year but I pretty much got no further than registering a domain. I’m just going to post here as the mood strikes.)

One decision I made over the holidays was that I’m going to pull the plug on my Cloudy Chat podcast. It’s gotten pretty irregular and unfocused and I don’t really see that changing. Furthermore, while my work focus remains fairly broad, it’s shifted towards emerging technology topics, which “cloud” really isn’t any longer even if some of its newer aspects are. This isn’t to say that I won’t do the occasional published interview. But I think a podcast implies a schedule and topic focus that I don’t really see being in the cards for the immediate future.

What may take its place is some more work with video. I haven’t fleshed out what that means exactly but it’s an idea I’ve noodled on over time. I’m hoping that taking “I really ought to do a new podcast” off my omnipresent mental to-dos will free up some cycles to create short educational videos related to emerging tech areas.

Contact and social media information is unchanged. I’m on twitter as @ghaff. My photos are on Flickr. (I’m hopeful for Flickr’s revitalization post-Yahoo.) I’m on LinkedIn but, if I don’t know you, you send a form invite, and our connection isn’t obvious to me, I’ll probably ignore it. I’m still on Facebook but I’m pretty selective about friend requests; if I ignore you don’t take it personally if you’re a casual and/or professional acquaintance.

I occasionally do product and book reviews. Feel free to inquire if you have something you think might interest me. But I’m don’t do a lot and I emphatically don’t write about things that I haven’t gotten hands-on with. I also sometimes do interviews at events. (See above re: podcasts however.) I mostly limit these to discussions about open source projects and other non-commercial topics. Otherwise, there’s just too much opportunity for conflicts of interest. 

I’m always open to speaking at/attending events on professional topics of interest. Some presentations are up on Slideshare. I do have a busy travel schedule though so I have to prioritize where I spend my time. (Somehow, the first few months of the year ended up especially crazy.)

To be done: Updating my overall website. It’s still a good source for links but I never really liked the design I used and I’ve held off on updating it recently as a result. 

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