Today ends my vDM30in30 challenge. This makes the 30th post and goes out just a bit before the end of the day on November 30th, 2015. I hit the mark within the timeframe, yay! That’s an improvement over last year’s 25 posts. Writing 30 posts in 30 days was difficult for me, but rewarding. Let’s take a look at why I participated, what I did, and whether it helped me.

I participated in vDM30in30 this year, as in last year, to work on my writing skills. Specifically, I wanted to work on speed. I can write a really long blog post, no problem – some of my Puppet posts were over 5,000 words before I split them up – but it takes me FOREVER! I wanted to work on writing posts of the same length in a shorter duration, but without lowering the quality. This was more than just a requirement to get 30 posts done in 30 days, but something that I think can benefit me elsewhere. Sometimes I spend 10 minutes writing a non-technical email that’s just a single paragraph, and I don’t think that’s really worthy of one sixth of an hour. I was sure I would gain in other ways, but everything was secondary to speed.

Well, not everything. Right before the challenge started, I joined the other participants in trying to encourage others to participate in the challenge. We succeeded, as we had a number of new participants in this year’s challenge! I’ve also spoken to a few people who missed out on the challenge but don’t want to wait until next November to participate, so they may be looking at running the same challenge in January! If anyone else is interested in joining them, let me know in the comments. Thanks to everyone who participated in the challenge, new and existing participants, it was great to see this grow year over year!

Now, back to my challenge efforts. To work on speed, I used a number of tactics:

• Varied topics. Much of my blog content is what I would consider deep technical content. I wasn’t certain that increasing speed here with the given timeframe was feasible, but I was certain that I could improve speed on this content if I improved speed on other content. I wrote about vSphere, Puppet, Travis CI, and Ruby bundler (all in a not-quite-as-deep manner), and I also branched out into an ode to snow, thoughts on Footloose and 2112, troubleshooting, note taking techniques, our pug Loki, and even got meta about post quality and what to do when the well runs dry.
• Make November a month of projects. I participated in the challenge while continuing work on other projects (upgrading modules for puppet 4 support, learning Travis CI, Commitmas), making each of these projects fodder for vDM30in30. This ties into the next item, as the project milestone often came under the same time limit.
• Set a (soft) timer. I often did this by deciding that I had X minutes available, I had a topic I thought could be done in X minutes, and I’d write and post it immediately. I gave myself enough time to do proofreading but I tried to keep to whatever time limit I set. Sometimes I’d have to stop writing because I had to leave the house, and hitting the Post button was difficult but necessary. Of course, I still wanted to keep the quality up so I reserved the right to not hit post or ditch the post entirely. I only made use of this once, and I just needed 5 minutes for proofing when I got back to the computer.
• Use brainstorming sessions. My normal technique is to think of something I want to write about and then do it. Instead, I would spend 10-30 minutes thinking of what I wanted to write about and making a list in Evernote. By making the list ahead of time, I had a number of solidd ideas to toss around in my head for a few days. When I sat down to write, I often had a rough outline or a list of points to emphasis already. This became especially important at the end of the journey when I started to run out of ideas. If I was going to rack my brain, I wanted to do it for 5 subjects, not just one!
• Press the post button! Of course, none of the above techniques mattered if I didn’t post the article. I didn’t schedule a single post, every article was made live the moment it was finished. Getting over the fear of hitting post quickly became a secondary goal.

So, did this help me, did I achieve what I set out to? I hit the mark of 30 posts in 30 days and I certainly feel like I improved. I know that I’m proud of myself for following up on my pledge! But did I improve my speed while maintaining or improving the quality of my content? I need to hear from you! I appreciate any and all feedback here in the comments or on twitter. Thank you!

You can see all of the vDM30in30 posts here, including those from 2014.

I have been playing flag football for almost 10 years now and I enjoy it immensely. Last year, when we moved to Indianapolis, I was dismayed that I could not find a competitive league to play in. There are a number of weekly pick-up games, though, and through them I learned of a men’s church league and was invited to join a new team there.

New teams can be tricky. A “new” team that’s a split of an existing team with a few new players can often go far, they have a core that’s intact and capable. I ended up on a real new team, where only two members had played together previously and some had never played flag football before. Flag is quite different than regular football. There’s no downfield blocking, you can’t stiff arm, you can’t tackle. All of those lead to penalties or ejections and are often what trip up people new to flag rules, even if they’ve played some HS, College, or even NFL ball. You also lack any connection between players. The quarterback might under- or overestimate a receiver’s speed and end up throwing lots of picks.

For this reason, it’s no surprise that many new teams go 0-X, rarely going 1-X, and almost always losing badly in playoffs if they make it there. In the regular season, we went 1-6. We ended up losing our last regular season game to the #1 team 66-24. Ouch. That put us in last place, meaning we got to play them again the next week in the first round of the playoffs. It would be easy to foresee the loss and throw in the towel right away. I’ve seen lots of teams play a man down due to low attendance or even forfeit that game, knowing it would be a blow-out. Can’t blame anyone, you don’t get paid and some people drive an hour each way plus the game time.

Instead, our team stayed with it. We had more people show up than the previous week. We analyzed what went wrong and came up with a game plan. The opponents used a quick strike offense with timing routes, so we rushed often and played press. By halftime, their QB had thrown 3 picks and we managed to keep it tied. We ended up winning 28-27, scoring the go-ahead points with 12 seconds left. We surprised everyone just by showing up and wowed them by beating the #1 seed.

The next week, we had a matchup against the #2 team. We had the same number of people show up and we again put a game plan together. We had not played the team the week before so our game plan wasn’t quite as good. We went on to lose by one score, 47-42, bringing the team down to the wire.

It was a hell of a season. It was fun to fight adversity and come together as a team to victories, both real and moral. I can’t wait for the spring season to see where we go from here!

Today is Thanksgiving in America. I’m conflicted in how I feel about Thanksgiving, thanks to John Oliver and Last Week Tonight, but I am undoubtedly thankful for a lot of things – my family, my friends, having a job, community, etc. One thing my wife, Michelle, and I are really thankful for is that our nearly 15 year old pug, Loki, is still with us this Thanksgiving.

Catching some Z’s

Dressed as a spider

Enjoying his favorite treat, a giant carrot!

As Loki has aged, he’s remained a vibrant character, always living up to his namesake, but time catches up with us all. These changes have taught my wife and I a lot over the years, lessons that we can apply elsewhere in our lives.

About 5 or 6 years ago, Loki lost his hearing. It took us quite a while to catch on! We had taught obedience using verbal and hand signals. A “down” command was accompanied by moving your hand, palm down, toward the floor. As long as Loki was looking at us, he was quite obedient. One day, we went for a walk and on the way back, Loki lost visual contact with Michelle and thought she was behind us. He took off down the street, ignoring our shouts, which was quite alarming. He got in a lot of trouble for that, and we still did not understand the issue for a few days until we said “treat” and he didn’t react – that’s how you know for certain that a dog is deaf! Loki taught us that when someone cannot verbalize their problems, it’s up to you to “listen” to the other signals they send. It’s your fault that you didn’t use the right vocabulary to understand them, and you shouldn’t get mad at them.

A few years later, Loki started having issues with his eyesight. As we had become quite reliant on hand signals since he was deaf, this was problematic! His vision has faded slowly, thanks to some good veterinarian ophthalmologists, but it’s going bit by bit. This has caused some other health issues as he is now prone to scratch his eyes, and we’ve been to the vet more than once for a scratched cornea. The poor guy has to wear a cone when he’s not closely supervised!

Altogether, these vision problems have taught Michelle and I quite a bit. We have to rely on Loki’s sense of touch more often. He may look right at you but not see you, so you have to rely on other senses, such as touching him with your hand or foot to get his attention. If he doesn’t see us, he may run to another room to look for us – and he’s fast! We spend a lot of time chasing him around the house now, trying to get his attention. This has taught us, again, to be patient with him and not get mad. We also have to pay more attention for him and anticipate where he’s heading, as he could run into something that hurts very easily.

Finally, over the summer we discovered an inoperable tumor in Loki’s mouth. Though it’s growing and we can’t do anything about it, you could hardly tell, he’s as feisty as ever. But we realize this could be his last Thanksgiving with us. We’re thankful that he’s still here and we’re hopeful he makes it to his 15th birthday in two weeks and Christmas after that. We’ve learned to spend more time with him than we were before and to enjoy every moment of it!

Loki, thanks for spending so much time with us and for teaching us so much! You’re the best pug anyone could ask for!

I love the changes the seasons bring. The warmth and rebirth of spring, the long days and sunshine of summer, the cooling temperatures and changing leaves of fall, and the snow and shorter daylight of winter. In particular, I really, really love the snow. I love watching it snow, I love the dogs playing in it, and it’s great football weather. Sure, I don’t love raking leaves and shoveling snow, but the benefits far outweigh these negatives.

This may seem an odd thing to wax poetic about, but my wife and I grew up in the MidWest and North, respectively, and spent almost a decade in the South. We really missed the seasons when we were in North Carolina, where the summer is about 9-10 months long. Living in Eastern VA was a bit better, the seasons were closer to 3 months each and we got snow a few times, but it was rare enough that you’d have to be crazy to drive in it. We’re now in Indiana, where the seasons are seasonal and snow is just something that happens.

This past weekend was the first snow of the season, which was really fun. I even got to play some flag football in it which is amazingly fun. I love me some snow!