You know it’s funny. For 2024, I theoretically started with a plan. But that plan was in the form of a YouTube video instead of an actual blog post. The problem with creating a video instead of a post is that it’s hard to scan through it and check on how I did. It’s also hard to copy and paste the format for the next year’s blog post. So this year I’m doing my future self a favor and sticking to the blog post format.
With that preamble out of the way, I thought I would take some time and create a planning list for 2025. This list isn’t meant to be comprehensive and I certainly cannot predict everything that will come down the pike in 2025, but it’s a solid starting place for activities I am relatively certain I will continue to do in the new year.
Let’s get started!
This is the list of things that I want to get done in 2025. Where possible, I am trying to put some numbers against these goals to track my progress over the year and see how I did.
Last year I published 116 videos on my YouTube channel! But that is counting all the Chaos Lever videos, of which there’s two a week. I’d like to get into a solid cadence with my Terraform Tuesdays stuff and maybe get back to doing some Cloud Perspectives and other topics. In terms of actual numbers, here’s what I’m hoping to do:
I have a home lab with bunch of Raspberry Pis, a Turing 2 compute board, and four Supermicro servers. I really should do something with all that gear beyond letting it take up space in the basement. What possible topics do I have in mind? Here’s a few: Proxmox, NodeWeaver, Azure Arc, and AI. I’ll have to see which one tickles my fancy this year and focus up on that. If you’re a vendor looking to sponsor something with my home lab, please reach out!
WebAssembly is one of those technologies that I’ve been meaning to dig into, but I keep putting it off. This year I’d like to really understand how wasm works and how one goes about managing it from an operational perspective. This may end up being a livestream learning thing.
Oh look! I’ve added a new category of shit to do. Well done me. I’ve always enjoyed learning in public, but that has mostly been through blogs and carefully planned videos. This year I’d like to do some livestreams of me working on new technology, and I’ve found a partner to do that. Marino Wijay and I are working on a series of livestreams wherein we will try to build an Python-based solution that leverages AI to automate… something. That something right now is my podcast publishing workflow, but we’re still actively planning and brainstorming. This is subject to change!
I’d also like to rope Marino or someone else in the second half of the year to do some WebAssembly livestreaming. I may reach out to people active in that area, where they can be the expert and I’ll be the audience proxy. Are you that somebody? Reach out and ping me!
I’ve not done a ton of livestreaming before, so this is uncharted territory for me. I also don’t watch a lot of other livestreams, so I may need to do a little research and learn some of the etiquette and audience expectations. Or I’ll just wing it and make my own norms! Yeah, it’s probably going to be that second one.
Day Two DevOps went through a lot of changes in 2024, and I don’t really want to introduce anything big in 2025. In 2024, we changed the podcast name, changed the cohost, and switched to a fortnightly cadence for non-sponsored content. Oh, and we now have a merch store and cool sticker! What I’m saying is that 2024 was A LOT. I’d like 2025 to be LESS.
Kyler and I will keep finding interesting guests and chat with them about cool stuff. In fact, we already have amazing episodes in the can for January and February covering security anthropology, networking science, and the state of serverless. As always, we are open to sponsors and advertisers, so if you are a vendor who wants to get their message out and have a great time doing it, hit us up!
Chris and I have settled into a nice routine when it comes to Chaos Lever. The podcast also saw significant change in 2024, with the introduction of HumblePod for editing, migrating to a proper website, migrating to a proper feed host, and publishing content on YouTube. We also experimented with guests to great success! Our shows with Sarah Autumn and Dylan Beattie were some of my favorites for the year. I’d like to have more guests in the coming year, so they can bring their unique expertise about tech history to our adoring fans.
Chris has also been making some noise about restarting the newsletter. We’ll see if he follows through on that. I’d like to also work with AI to convert out scripts to blog posts. Believe it or not, Chris and I write out most of the episode content and it should be pretty easy to convert that to a blog post. You’d think AI would be able to do this easily… You would be incorrect (so far).
Last year I did a grand total of ONE course for Pluralsight, which is my lowest output since 2017. This was in large part due to the tumultuous year Pluralsight had and the fact that I was still feeling a bit raw about the whole slashing-author-payments-by-25%-with-little-to-no-notice thing. Also that Azure Virtual Desktop set of courses was extremely difficult to produce and I was absolutely burned out on course creation for a while.
2024 was a year of acceptance and coming to terms with things, and I have come to terms with the fact that Pluralsight has changed and I need to change with it. They still represent a large portion of my revenue, and if I want to sustain that revenue, I need to put work back into the machine. Keep the flywheel going as it were.
My plan for 2025 is to refresh several of my courses and create a couple new ones:
Those items should keep me plenty busy in 2025!
The Terraform Associate guide has been updated for the 003 version of the exam. I don’t expect a new version of the exam to drop for at least another year, and more likely two years.
My Vault Associate guide needs to be updated for version 002 of the exam. I haven’t looked too closely at the updated objectives, but I don’t think they’ve changed too dramatically. I’ll try and get this done in Q2 of the year.
As for the Terraform Pro certification, I started writing a guide in 2024. But then Mattias Fjellstrom published his and I am just pointing everyone at that guide. Maybe I’ll change my mind, but I doubt it.
In 2024, I averaged one HashiCorp Academy class a month. Given the dip in Pluralsight revenue, I am probably going to increase that a bit in 2025. I’m aiming to do about four classes per quarter, or 16 for the year. I’ve already signed up to do eight classes through June, which puts me on track for my goal. It’s a nice mix of Terraform Foundations, HCP Terraform, and Vault Enterprise, so I won’t be teaching the same class eight times (whew).
The migration of my site off Wordpress was completed in 2024, and I am very happy about that. I didn’t blog as much as I wanted to last year, and I’d like to change that. I know, I KNOW. Every blogger says they mean to blog more and few rarely do it. However writing by itself is not the problem. I write thousands of words every week for various things, it just doesn’t always make its way onto the blog. For all the podcasts and videos that I do, each one could probably become a blog post. Doing so requires transforming the media to a written form that is easy to consume, and has all the attendant graphics, sections, and tags.
My hope is that I can leverage AI to help transform my other media content into blog posts. If ChatGPT or similar could get it 80% of the way there, I can tailor it to meet my standards and move it across the finish line. I’m hoping to have at least one blog post a week. Whether its something original or adapted from Terraform Tuesday, Chaos Lever, or Day Two DevOps, content is not the problem, time and effort is.
I’ve signed up to attend Cloud Field Day 22 in February, and I’ll probably do another one this year in the Fall. These events really do help me stay abreast of what’s going on with technology and network for new clients and sponsorships.
For 2024, I kept things pretty chill when it comes to conferences. I went to the DevOpsDays Philly in the spring and then both the NYC and DC AWS Summits in the summer. For the autumn, I only went to HashiConf, despite almost going to KubeCon and re:Invent. Ultimately, there was just too much going on at home and I didn’t see a huge benefit to going to either event. It also doesn’t help that I would have attended the events on my own dime, and conference passes, travel, and hotels ain’t cheap. Considering it was a down year for Ned in the Cloud as a whole, adding a bunch of additional expenses didn’t seem financially sound.
In 2025, I want to continue focusing on smaller conferences that are closer to home. Although there’s nothing on the books yet, I hope DevOpsDays Philly comes back for the spring. I’ll definitely come back to the AWS NYC Summit in the summer and HashiConf in the autumn. I think I also need to go to KubeCon or re:Invent, but which one? Honestly, it’s going to come down to whether I can get someone else to foot the bill for travel. Maybe I’ll submit some talks to both and see if I get accepted at either.
If you have suggestions for other conferences, or maybe even want me to keynote yours, let me know! I delivered the keynote for IntegraONE’s ONE CON conference this year and it was a great success!
There were a few surprise opportunities that popped up in 2024 that I will be pursuing in 2025.
I have agreed to write a shorter book for O’Reilly around running Linux on Microsoft Azure. The first chapter is already done and submitted, leaving another six to go. The book is slated for publishing in June. I’m coauthoring it with Chris Hayner, which makes the workload manageable. This book has a big upfront payment with no royalties. Given my previous experience with book royalties, upfront payments are the way to go.
A former Cloud Field Day presenter reached out to me to develop some Terraform modules for their edge solution. Building them was a lot of fun and they have already indicated they’ll have more work for me in 2025. It was nice to do some real-world consulting and not just create demos and training.
Several of the people I worked with at Pluralsight have gone to work for a training company called Multiverse. I’ve already built out some instructional materials for them in 2024, and I expect to do more in 2025. Much like the O’Reilly book, this is upfront payments for work delivered and no royalties. The level of effort is nicely aligned with the compensation- after a little haggling- so I’m happy to keep doing this work for people I trust.
If I’m being totally honest, I’m entering 2025 with a mix of trepidation and excitement. The trepidation comes from both the political reality of being a US citizen, and also the economic uncertainty of having an ill-tempered, petulant toddler for a US President being led around by another ill-tempered, petulant toddler, neither of which seem to have ever learned impulse control. That could reek havoc on the economy and the tech sector, or it could not.
My excitement stems from all the new projects I’m going to embark on this year. Learning Python and AI, digging into wasm, doing actual Terraform consulting, and who knows what else by the end of the 2025. As long as I stick to my core principles of embracing discomfort, planning to fail, and leading with kindness, this coming year is going to be a good one.
Happy New Year to all of you and may you have an interesting and enjoyable 2025!
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