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title, date
| title | date |
|---|---|
| Week 10, Sunday: Shipping sFlow | 2024-10-06T21:55:00+02:00 |
{{< 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], and I took a first pass review over the code so far,
ended up formatting it into a [Gerrit] on the
[FD.io] code tracker.
The main contribution of the day was writing this [article]. 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].
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] or [Akvorado] 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
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{{< 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." >}}
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