The road to VCDX, Part 4: Discipline

Wow, again it has been a few weeks after the last post around my journey in becoming VCDX-DTM. And what a past few weeks it were. If anyone told me it was this hard, I would probably laughed at them. Since the last blog I learned something about myself I didn’t think I had: Discipline.

Let’s get back in time a few weeks. My design got roasted big time. But what do you do when you fall down? Of course, you get up again. And that’s what I did. I had one major goal: Submit on the 25th of August, one day before I would fly to Las Vegas.

In my last post, I wrote about creating a story line for the design and stick to it. And so I did. I completely rewrote most of what I already had and made it a lot easier for the reader to follow me. Unfortunately, I also have a full time job as an architect at a big insurance company in the Netherlands, so I had to do this next to that job. And that’s where discipline comes in. When you are so focussed in achieving something like I do now, it will become easier to stick to the plan.

I learned some other stuff as well along the way:

Word 2016 for Mac still sucks ass. Auto save does a good job, but you need to make sure that everything you do is saved.
Making copies to different cloud providers is a good idea. I used both Stack and Dropbox and when one of them broke, I still had the copy of the other. Which saved me from a heart attack.
Having people to guide you who are true specialists in certain areas is really helpful.
Paying those people off with massive spare ribs is how you get them to stay helpful.
Drinking coffee during both day and night doesn’t really help in the long run.
Drinking beer doesn’t either.
The road in becoming VCDX has a low W.A.F.
It’s hard to explain what an IT Architect does for a living to people who think a Raspberry Pi is actually something you bake in the oven. It’s even harder to explain why you drag yourself in a journey like this.
A homelab is essential in validating stuff. I wrote most of the design at a customer that uses Vblocks (which I don’t think have a lot of W.A.F.), but I still got to validate and test some of the things that I designed.
The design is one thing, but don’t forget about the supporting documentation. That could be a lot of work as well.
Oh and be sure to link your requirements instead of just referring to them as text. Saves you a lot of work when you change the sequence of requirements.

And yesterday it finally happened. I submitted the whole thing. Basically enough pages to lift a monitor with 6 centimeters.