This rainy Halloween marks the end of October and the end of another year of Blogtober Tech Edition. This is the third year Matt Heldstab (@mattheldstab) has organized this effort within the tech community. Participants commit to the creation of five blog posts of original content in the month of October. As in past years (2017, 2018) there are in progress updates cataloging the efforts of everyone involved and there will be a final summary post at the end. In addition to this being the third year Matt has organized Blogtober Tech Edition, this is my third year of enrolling to participate. While participating in 2017 and 2018 provided a motivation to publish content, I failed to complete the five-post commitment. Thus this, my fifth post of the month, marks my first year of successfully completing the effort.
In the month of September, I had the opportunity to visit North Central Wisconsin VMUG’s SuperVMUG event. At this event, Ariel Sanchez (@arielsanchezmor) delivered the opening keynote. Despite having this blog for a few years now, Ariel’s comments on community involvement, particularly some comments around learning and then sharing with the larger community, struck a chord with me. As the post history on this blog shows, I struggle to regularly post. I came away from the keynote with a mission to simply publish as a I work through things. I’ve attempted to apply to this to my writing this month. I started off attempting to write a single post on my current technique to building Windows 10 base images for my lab. I realized that the amount of material there was simply more than I would ever manage to put together in a single post. Additionally, I would more than likely change things before I published the post. Instead of having that half-finished post lingering in my drafts folder, I started identifying portions of that work that I was ready share and that could stand on their own. This has resulted in two posts that are now live on the site with more to come.
