Bare Metal Blog series hiatus.

#f5 #BareMetalBlog Time to take a break, let the laggards catch up on reading, and talk about topics other than hardware for a bit.

You do not have to be a top-flight auto mechanic to appreciate the precision with which some cars are made. From Rolls Royce on down, there are some cars that just evoke appreciation of the way they were developed. If you’re like me, and pretty far from a top-flight auto mechanic, that list extends pretty far down the chain to car names that are household words. The same is generally true of computer hardware. There is no requirement that you even know how to use a soldiering gun to appreciate that computer X is faster/bigger/better than computer Y. You have acceleration speed in autos and I/O performance in computer hardware that can be measured, like against like, for example. In my case, I’ve done hardware – design, prototype, firmware, device drivers, software. I’ve even played with programming FPGAs, though that bit I haven’t done professionally. So I’m far closer to a computer engineer than an auto mechanic. Which made the Bare Metal Blog a great idea for me to develop when I first heard about the concept.

When I set out on the Bare Metal Blog series, it was going to go at a nice leisurely pace and not overtake the bulk of my blogging activity. It was supposed to delve into the hardware world and talk about some of the things that you, the reader, reap the benefits of, often without even realizing. Like a car, you don’t have to be a hardware engineer to appreciate the power, but a little knowledge can help through troubled spots.

But as I delved deeper, more things bubbled to the surface. The list of blogs waiting to be published just grew, and it became more than I’d originally planned.

To my normal reader base, who are accustomed to me spreading the love between AppDev, Storage, Networking, and IT Management, my apologies if it was too much. To those who are here precisely because of the bare metal blog series, thanks for dropping in, cruise around and see what else I ramble about.

But this is notice that, for now, the Bare Metal Blog is going into the garage. We’re not done, but it won’t be a weekly feature anymore. That’s good, I have a ton of other blog topics rolling around in my head that I really do want to get posted, and we’ve reached a logical breaking point in the series.

The series is here, if you’ve missed it: Bare Metal Blogs on F5 DevCentral. I have learned a ton since first embarking on the project, I do hope it’s been helpful to you also.

Between the first Bare Metal installment, I have done a ton of Android dev, started on Node.JS, toyed with JS development for mobile (as a multi-platform development tool), Lori and I have sorted through our CS books (hundreds of them), and picked the few we wanted to keep, and I’ve replaced my work laptop… That’s off the top of my head, and all of them are screaming for more (or any) blog time.

And now there will be at least that long between this Bare Metal Blog entry and the next. Unless a ton of you write asking me to pick it back up sooner, I’ll circle around and talk about the other topics I enjoy, and what’s going on in the wider world.

But, Like the Load Balancers for Developers series, I’ll circle back and write new installments on occasion. The point is not to end the series, but just add it to the cycle of blogs. I do hope you enjoyed the firehose, but it’s time to change it to a tap, with the volume turned down.

But next week, we’ll be off blogging on something new… Probably what Lori and I did and didn’t choose to keep books-wise, because somewhere between our personalities and the state of computing lies the algorithm for defining what stayed and what didn’t. Should be fun to explore.