Sunday, sFlow ship day

content/blog/wk10day7.md

@@ -1,7 +1,56 @@
 ---
-title: "Week 10, Sunday:"
+title: "Week 10, Sunday: Shipping sFlow"
 date: 2024-10-06T21:55:00+02:00
-draft: true
 ---
 
-{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/todo.png" alt="Credit: " >}}
+{{< image frame="true" width="17em" float="right" src="/img/headline/kushsessions-07.png" alt="Credit: KushSessions, YouTube" >}}
+
+I wrote a lot today, but it was not this journal entry. In the morning, I completed the acceptance
+loadtests for the upcoming `sFlow` plugin in VPP. You can find this code on
+[[GitHub](https://github.com/sflow/vpp-sflow)], and I took a first pass review over the code so far,
+ended up formatting it into a [[Gerrit](https://gerrit.fd.io/r/c/vpp/+/41680)] on the
+[[FD.io](https://fd.io/)] code tracker.
+
+The main contribution of the day was writing this
+[[article](https://ipng.ch/s/articles/2024/10/06/vpp-with-sflow-part-2/)]. In the afternoon, I
+tidied up the backing data for it, and in the evening I spent some time with Neil closing off a few
+loose ends, and grooming the [[issues](https://github.com/sflow/vpp-sflow/issues)].
+
+It's striking to me what a great difference in attention and time spent writing an IPng article
+versus writing a journal entry. The latter is pretty much just autopilot, the dutch would say "van
+je af schrijven", perhaps a close analogy in English is "free word association". Just whatever comes
+to mind. I often use visual cues from the picture gallery, as that reminds me of what I did. I
+figure: if it's important enough to snap a picture of, it's probably important enough to write a
+sentence of two in my journal. 
+
+With technical articles, it's very different for me. They need to follow a structure, setting the
+context, providing necessary back references and most importantly, they need to be _correct_. Doing
+math is hard, and doing correct math even harder still! Taking today's article as an example, I
+rewrote it twice. I had in mind to create a version 2 .. version 5 style iterative storyline,
+showing what we concluded and what we improved on. But, I lacked the literal setup, what am I
+testing, what is the LAB setup, T-Rex configs, and so on. If people were to want to reproduce my
+work, they will find the article I landed on better than the one I started with. 
+
+But the cost of this approach is, of course, time. All in all, this article took about eleven hours
+to write, and I ended up committing it after dinner, only to make a few edits for clarity and
+readability (and typos) in the late evening. I'm planning on a third article, that discusses what
+happens _outside_ of the VPP dataplane, in other words, how this thing integrates with existing
+tools and products, perhaps using [[sflow-rt](https://sflow-rt.com/)] or
+[[Akvorado](https://akvorado.net/)] as end-to-end examples. That one is going to take a while to
+develop and report on, as well, but I think it's worth it, for the community.
+
+If all I did is write one web page in the entire day, no pictures were taken :) To leave my gallery
+not entirely empty, I've added a screenshot of one of the T-Rex loadtest runs that made it into the
+articles.  Tomorrow, we ship off to Italy and I hope the traffic deities will bless our travel, as
+the Fall vacation has started and who knows how many people will try to cram themselves through the
+Gottard tunnel?
+
+## Pictures of the Day                                                                                                                                
+                                                                                                                                                      
+{{< gallery-category >}}                                                                                                                              
+  {{< gallery-photo fn="2024-10-06/trex.png" caption="A Cisco T-Rex loadtest screenshot from the IPng.ch article about sFLow that I wrote today." >}}
+{{< /gallery-category >}}                                                  
+                                                                           
+{{< gallery-modal >}}                                                      
+{{< gallery-script >}}                                                     
+