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The adventures of 2016

2016 was filled with professional successes and exciting adventures, but also various personal struggles. I exhausted myself finishing two books, navigated some complicated parts of my marriage, experienced my whole team getting laid off from a job we loved, handled an uptick in migraines and a continuing bout of bronchitis, and am still coming to terms with the recent loss.

It’s been difficult to maintain perspective, but it actually was an incredible year. I succeeded in having two books come out, my travels took me to some new, amazing places, we bought a vacation house, all my blood work shows that I’m healthier than I was at this time last year.


Lots more running in 2016 led to a healthier me!

Some of the tough stuff has even been good. I have succeeded in strengthening bonds with my husband and several people in my life who I care about. I’ve worked hard to worry less and enjoy time with friends and family, which may explain why this year ended up being the one of the group selfie. I paused to capture happy moments with my loved ones a lot more often.

So without further ado, the more quantitative year roundup!

The 9th edition of the The Official Ubuntu Book came out in July. This is the second edition I’ve been part of preparing. The book has updates to bring us up to the 16.04 release and features a whole new chapter covering “Ubuntu, Convergence, and Devices of the Future” which I was really thrilled about adding. My work with Matthew Helmke and José Antonio Rey was also very enjoyable. I wrote about the release here.

I also finished the first book I was the lead author on, Common OpenStack Deployments. Writing a book takes a considerable amount of time and effort, I spent many long nights and weekends testing and tweaking configurations largely written by my contributing author, Matt Fischer, writing copy for the book and integrating feedback from our excellent fleet of reviewers and other contributors. In the end, we released a book that takes the reader from knowing nothing about OpenStack to doing sample deployments using the same Puppet-driven tooling that enterprises use in their environments. The book came out in September, I wrote about it on my own blog here and maintain a blog about the book at DeploymentsBook.com.


Book adventures at the Ocata OpenStack Summit in Barcelona! Thanks to Nithya Ruff for taking a picture of me with my book at the Women of OpenStack area of the expo hall (source) and Brent Haley for getting the picture of Lisa-Marie and I (source).

This year also brought a new investment to our lives, we bought a vacation home in Pennsylvania! It’s a new construction townhouse, so we spent a fair amount of time on the east coast the second half of this year searching for a place, picking out the details and closing. We then spent the winter holidays here, spending a full two weeks away from home to really settle in. I wrote more about our new place here.

I keep saying I won’t travel as much, but 2016 turned out to have more travel than ever, taking over 100,000 miles of flights again.


Feeding a kangaroo, just outside of Melbourne, Australia

At the Jain Temple in Mumbai, India

We had lots of beers in Germany! Photo in the center by Chris Hoge (source)

Barcelona is now one of my favorite places, and it’s Sagrada Familia Basilica was breathtaking

Most of these conferences and events had a speaking component for me, but I also did a fair number of local talks and at some conferences I spoke more than once. The following is a rundown of all these talks I did in 2016, along with slides.


Photo by Masayuki Igawa (source) from Linux Conf AU in Geelong

Photo by Johanna Koester (source) from my keynote at the Ocata OpenStack Summit

MJ and I have also continued to enjoy our beloved home city of San Francisco, both with just the two of us and with various friends and family. We saw a couple Giants baseball games, along with one of the Sharks playoff games! Sampled a variety of local drinks and foods, visited lots of local animals and took in some amazing local sights. We went to the San Francisco Symphony for the first time, enjoyed a wonderful time together over over Labor Day weekend and I’ve skipped out at times to visit museum exhibits and the zoo.


Dinner at Luce in San Francisco, celebrating MJ’s new job

This year I also geeked out over trains – in four states and five countries! In May MJ and I traveled to Maine to spend some time with family, and a couple days of that trip were spent visiting the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport and the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum in Portland, I wrote about it here. I also enjoyed MUNI Heritage Weekend with my friend Mark at the end of September, where we got to see some of the special street cars and ride several vintage buses, read about that here. I also went up to New York City to finally visit the famous New York Transit Museum in Brooklyn and accompanying holiday exhibit at the Central Station with my friend David, details here. In Philadelphia I enjoyed the entire Girard Street line (15) which is populated by historic PCC streetcars (trolleys), including one decorated for the holidays, I have a pile of pictures here. I also got a glimpse of a car on the historic streetcar/trolley line in Melbourne and my buddy Devdas convinced me to take a train in Mumbai, and I visited the amazing Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus there too. MJ also helped me plan some train adventures in the Netherlands and Germany as I traveled from airports for events.


From the Seashore Trolley Museum barn

As I enter into 2017 I’m thrilled to report that I’ll be starting a new job. Travel continues as I have trips to Australia and Los Angeles already on my schedule. I’ll also be spending time getting settled back into my life on the west coast, as I have spent 75% of my time these past couple months elsewhere.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 2nd, 2017 at 7:19 am and is filed under EOY, life, reflection. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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