As I continue down my path in the engineering space, I often ask myself a few questions:
- What exactly do I do?
- What value am I bringing to the table?
- What’s my purpose?
These questions are incredibly important to answer not just for myself, but for everyone that’s supporting and following me on my mission.
I recently reached over 20,000 followers on LinkedIn and Twitter, and it got me thinking – “does everyone know what my actual goal is?”.
In this blog post, I want to take some time to tell you exactly what I do, why I do it, how I do it, and why I believe it’s incredibly crucial for the future of technology.
Production-Specific Content
There’s a lot of amazing, well-rounded content in the world. Think about it – if you just go to YouTube and look up what you’re looking for, you’re bound to find something. There are also a ton of great content creators that literally do it for a living.
A lot of the content available right now that gets picked up by the algorithms and is known as “popular” is considered, in the marketing world, Top Of Funnel. Top Of Funnel content is meant to get eyes on a specific tool or product. It’s all about driving views to gain popularity.
With a lot of this content, you don’t actually learn how to work with a product/tool/platform in production. You learn what the product/tool/platform is, what the methodology is, and how to use it, but you don’t learn how to implement it in a production-driven scenario.
This is where my content comes into play.
It’s typically called Middle Of Funnel.
My content isn’t meant to drive traffic or likes/impressions (although, it does organically simply because it’s valuable). It’s meant to teach readers/viewers how to implement the technology in production scenarios. That’s why a lot of my content isn’t based on high-level information.
In short – I create content that you use in production.
I like to think of it as a guide or best practice of sorts. Instead of writing out a ton of architecture on a whiteboard, you can use one of my pieces of content and tape it on the whiteboard (theoretically of course). It should be your guide to utilizing a specific technology in production.
Consume Data; Share Data
A lot of people ask me why I focus on Kubernetes and containerization, and here’s why. When creating production-driven content, there are a ton of implementation details.
Things like:
- Where it’s running (in the cloud, on-prem, etc.).
- How it’s going run (what repeatable process).
- What other tools and platforms are used to make it run properly.
- What’s the most efficient way to implement.
Because of that, even though I’m focused on Kubernetes and containerization, there are a lot of other implementations that go into it. For example, if I’m showcasing how to deploy a Kubernetes cluster, I need to show the repeatable process. That’s where something like Terraform comes into play.
The reason why I focus on a specific area is because naturally, that “area” must utilize other “areas” (like the Kubernetes plus Terraform example above).
Once I consume all of that data, I share it out with the world so everyone can use it.
In short – I Consume a massive amount of information and share it with you in bite-sized, but usable chunks.
Deep Dive So You Don’t Have To
When we consume information, our minds reach a certain breaking point. Research has shown that from a Deep Work perspective, individuals have roughly about 4-5 hours per day of true Deep Work without distractions. After those 4-5 hours, other things start naturally coming up in your mind. Did you take the trash out? Did you pay that bill? Did you forgot something in an email?
Because engineers have so much to think of, it’s nearly impossible to simply think about one thing in the stack. Engineers can’t think about just Kubernetes. They have to think about the meetings they’re on, the architecture, the networking, the CICD pipelines, the other teams, and a million other things. That’s why DevOps Engineers and Platform Engineers have such a huge job role.
To help out, I dive as deep as possible into a topic so you don’t have to. I’m almost like a proxy. I send out data (content) so you can consume it. You come to my content, consume what you need, and leave.
I spend hours every day reading, studying, and researching because I’m able to due to working for myself. My job is literally to read/study/research and then share that information with all of you. That’s what I’ve dedicated my career to.
In short – I dive as deep as possible into a topic and then create content on it so you don’t have to.
Help You Figure Out Your Direction
Going off of the previous section, all engineers in today’s world have huge job roles. They have what feels like a million things to do every day, on top of sitting in meetings.
What I do to help facilitate that is give you logical, production-ready information so you can then decide what you want to do for your environment. For example, the information I give you about Kubernetes will help you decide whether or not you actually want to run Kubernetes or rather, how you want to run it. Do you want to use a Service Mesh? GitOps? Is it valuable for you? Do you want to run on-prem or in the cloud?
Every single human is bogged down with decisions daily. Sometimes, you can find a solid answer to a decision. Other times, you have to spend more cognitive load coming up with the answer to the decision. My goal is to make coming up with the answer easier for you.
In short – I give you information so you can then decide what to do with it.
How Do I Do It Financially?
A question I get asked often is how do I do it from a financial perspective and keep myself going?
What’s my business model?
I break down what I do in three ways.
- B2b (Business To Business)
- Free content (blogs, YouTube, etc.)
- B2C (Business To Consumer)
B2B is the blog posts that you see me write typically about specific products and platforms. If you see my name on a blog on a vendor’s website, I got paid to write it. This is not to be confused with “they pay me to say what they want me to say”. I make it very clear to vendors that I’m not a spokesperson, so the content that I write is 100% genuine from my own research, words, and opinion. Why do I do that? Because I choose to say objective. Otherwise, I feel that I will lose my credibility, and it’s something I’ve worked incredibly hard for. The day I become subjective is the day that I hang up my hat. The good thing about B2B posts that you read is they are free to you. You don’t have to pay anything to read them. The company pays me to create content so you don’t have to pay.
The next part is free content. If you’ve been following me for a while, you know that I post a blog post weekly on Dev.to. I also write blogs on my personal website, create two LinkedIn posts per day, one Twitter post per day, and create YouTube videos, along with various other pieces of content. All of that is free and I don’t get paid to do it. The reason why I do it is because I like doing it. I believe that it’s incredibly important for everyone to have access to high-quality content that’s production-ready. I’m able to create so much free content that I don’t get paid for because my stream of income from clients exists.
The third part is B2C. I have a paid consumer offering where I write premium content, hold weekly calls, have private Slack channels, and everyone has direct access to me so they can ask any Kubernetes-related questions. It’s a quick way for anyone working in the Kubernetes space to have a community of folks that they can ask Kubernetes questions for their job and ask them to me directly along with other Kubernetes experts.
The whole idea when I went out on my own was to create high quality content and give engineers a way to learn in an easier fashion.
There’s so much to learn from a Kubernetes and containerization perspective in today’s world. My goal is to make that a bit more digestible.