Hi there,
Can I still wish you a Happy New Year? Yeah, it's been a while since my last "weekly" newsletter, for the usual reasons of work and life getting in the way. I'm still committed to sending out emails regularly, but I guess it's time to admit that this level of frequency was a bit too ambitious. Anyway, I managed to sit down to tell you about my focus topics for 2025!

Mentor Monologue

The start of a new year is a good occasion to evaluate where to put my severely limited time and attention. After a bit of brainstorming, three areas appeared to me as particularly important:
  • Efficient infrastructure
  • Fun with teaching
  • Effective remote collaboration
I'll start with explaining what I mean by "efficient infrastructure." Generally, I loathe introducing complexity just for complexity's sake, or just to join some bandwagon. This is why I was very late to adopting Docker. But it's also the reason that some recent videos about Docker Stack caught my attention. This feature is so much more lightweight than something like Kubernetes, and still perfectly adequate for projects that don't require Web Scale™. While I can see quite a bit of k8s in my work future, I'm also going to check where Docker Stack, Podman Pods and Incus fit in. As another example, I realized that I'm not going to need a complex Learning Management solution for my courses; a combination of my community platform and static websites will do nicely. I think at this stage of climate change, we have a duty to promote simpler approaches because they require not only less operative effort, but also fewer system resources. Bluefin has proven that lean alternatives have real practical value, so I will explore this angle further this year.

On to "fun with teaching." I started Monospace Mentor because I have a deep passion to share the decades of my experience in both infrastructure and software engineering. This year, I'm going to try getting a regular cadence of courses going. I want it to be a fun experience for both my participants and for myself; especially since this is still just a side job for me. From the time when I taught at SuSE training centres, I know that learning with others has much more potential to be fun for everyone involved than studying with books or self-guided courses. On top of this, in the face of AI slop making finding quality learning materials increasingly hard, I want to make my course prices to be within reach for basically everyone. That's why I decided not to charge steep course fees and instead, as I mentioned above, make my membership community with its affordable membership fees the central hub for my teaching. And since creating courses is awfully hard and time-consuming, we'll sprinkle in many smaller community events such as Deep Dive talks on a topic, and Hot Seats for members to get advice and feedback. I'm excited to have fun this year creating fun learning opportunities in The Server Room!

This community-centric approach gets us to the third list item. Let me tell you what a joy it is to witness members of The Server Room share their expertise and help each other grow. So much so that I want to foster this collaboration as much as possible. Running a fully distributed business since 2010 has taught me a lot, and I'd like to apply this experience in ways that benefit my community. One idea for remote community projects I'm going to in(ve)stigate is building a shared DevOps knowledge base; after all, documentation skills are important in engineering. Another idea that intrigued me lately is a community lab. Think "homelab, but available online to all community members". Wouldn't it be great to have access to a free mini private cloud, and work on it with fellow nerds? I think so, too, which is why "effective remote collaboration" will be my third area of interest this year.

I can't shake the feeling that these endeavours will still be quite the challenge given my time constraints. But hey, starting out with a focus on specific topics will at least reduce the risk of me crashing and burning.

What about you? Have you identified learning goals that you're going to pursue this year? Please let me know via my social media channels or, even better, in The Server Room!

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Jochen, the Monospace Mentor
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