Plans. What are these silly things we make? Each year I write a planning post for the coming 12 months for the sole purpose of having something to laugh at when the annum ends. As this has become a tradition, I see no reason to stop with 2026. What bold and completely wrong plans shall I make for the coming year? Stay tuned and find out.
Doing things has never been a problem for me. I cannot stop doing things. I’m always thing-a-ning. In fact, I often agree to do too many thing-a-nings and immediately regret my decisions. Since the boundary of December 31st is artificial at best, I’ve already promised to do many thing-a-nings in 2026. What have I got cooking?
I’ve already committed to producing four more livestreams for Terrateam in promotion of their ebook, From Bare Metal to Cloud. I really like the ebook and the conversations I’ve already had with Malcolm Matalka and Amber Britton have been great.
In addition to those livestreams, I’d also like to bring back my Terraform Tuesday content in a big way starting in June of 2026. I used to publish 2-3 a month, but that dropped way off in 2025 due to my workload with Pluralsight. By June I should be done my current crop of promised courses, and then I’d like to spend some time focused on building the YouTube channel again.
Terraform is not the only thing I’m interested in. I’d love to dig into other topics. Here’s a few that I’m thinking about:
Overall it sounds like what I need to build is some type of AI inferencing project that uses K8s, WASM, and OTel on my home lab gear. That’s the sort of thing that could keep me busy and produce some interesting content!
I’d really like to work on building the audience for Day Two DevOps in 2026. We have amazing guests and informative content, but how do we get that in front of the ears and eyes of the people? I’d like to break this into a few steps:
The goal is two-fold. First, and most importantly, I want to help people advance in their tech career by providing useful information. If we’re not doing that, then everything else is pointless. Secondly, I want to attract more sponsors to help support Day Two DevOps, so I can continue to make this good stuff. The audience will always come first, but sponsorships are ultimately what keeps the whole enterprise afloat.
For 2026, I’ve already committed to producing nine more courses for Pluralsight. I need to finish the last two courses that are part of the Terraform learning path. Once those are complete, I still owe them a Vault Associate (003) course that is all about preparing for the exam. That’s going to be a really short one, and I should be able to bang it out in a couple weeks.
After that, I am going to create a series of courses that are solely focused on the Terraform Associate Certification Version 004. That version dropped at the end of 2025, and is now available for exam scheduling. There have been some significant updates from Version 003 of the exam, as detailed here, and so it make sense to produce a series on Pluralsight that covers all the objectives.
How is this different from the Terraform learning path I’ve been working on for the past year? The Terraform learning path is not focused on the Associate exam, and goes well beyond the content tested for the certification. If you are purely interested in learning Terraform from the ground up and advancing to a professional level, I think the learning path is for you.
The certification path is going to be completely focused on the exam objectives, and they will be explicitly mapped to courses to help you decide which courses you need to take to fill in any knowledge gaps or refresh your memory. The certification courses don’t have a storyline or anything like that, they are meant to be quick, informative, and focused on the certification. If you are looking to pass the associate exam and get your cert, then I think the certification path makes more sense.
Ultimately, it’s about giving the learner choices. You aren’t locked into one path of another. You could easily build your own path from the collection of courses out there.
Once I finish those Terraform certification courses, I’m not sure what’s next in the Pluralsight world. I’ll probably sign on to do some Azure-related courses, as those have been good to me in the past. Or maybe it’s time to create some HashiCorp Boundary content. I have to see what is planned by Pluralsight and what I feel like doing.
I have two certification guides published: Terraform Associate and Vault Associate. Both of the guides need to be updated for versions 004 and 003 of the certifications respectively. My goal in 2026 is to get both of these guides updated.
More than that, I also need to promote these guides. I do virtually no promotion of these at all, and they still do decent sales. Imagine if I actually let people know they exist? What a concept!
The good news is that HashiCorp’s training partner, LearnQuest, is scheduling classes every month. There are currently three classes that I can teach:
That last class is a brand new one, and it’s a replacement for the old Terraform Advanced class. The new class includes the use of HCP Terraform, HCP Packer, and other advanced tooling and workflows that go well beyond the standard Terraform Foundations course. I highly recommend checking it out.
My current plan is to try and teach one class a month. I’m also involved with another training partner for private Terraform instruction. There will probably be 2-3 classes delivered for them through the year as well.
Beyond that, I’d like to start delivering 1-2 Microsoft classes a quarter. I’m now an official MCT, so I can do that. The only certification I have right now is AZ-104, so that’s the only class I can teach. I think I’m going to try and get a few more certifications this year, so I can teach a broader range of classes. Maybe I’ll focus on the Azure AI stuff? I bet that’s pretty popular. I think I’ll try and get the AI-900 and AI-102 certifications. That will force me to dig back into Python, and build some actual applications.
In 2025, my blog was incredibly quiet. Just like my YouTube channel, certification guides, and other projects, the overwhelming demands of Pluralsight took all of my writing mojo. This year I will make an effort to publish twice a month. It shouldn’t be too hard. There’s at least two Day Two DevOps episodes each month that would make for good blog posts, plus anything else I happen to be working on.
I do have a tendency to make blogging more complicated than it needs to be, writing 3500 words when 1500 would suffice. What can I say? Part of writing for me is the processing of working through my thoughts and ideas. What I really need to do is clean up a bit afterwards. It’s like I cooked you a fine dining meal, but also took you grocery shopping, walked you through the prep, and forced you to watch me cook. You just wanted a nice meal, you didn’t need all that extraneous stuff.
This might be one place that LLMs could help me out. Take my ridiculous ramblings and make them slightly more concise. That’s what a good editor does, and while I think LLMs aren’t very good authors, I think they can make excellent editors.
I’ve already signed up to go to Cloud Field Day 25 in March of 2026. Beyond that event, I expect to do a few paid gigs for Gestalt IT over the course of the year.
While I don’t relish flying out to California or the red-eye flight back, I’ve found my time in the Tech Field Day community invaluable. They keep me connected to interesting vendors, spark my interest in new topics, and challenge my current ideas. It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that Ned in the Cloud wouldn’t exist as it does today without Tech Field Day.
In 2025 I went to HashiConf, KubeCon, and IBM TechXchange. I’ll probably do the same in 2026. Although, KubeCon is in SLC and I have my own issues with Utah. Instead of KubeCon, I may switch things up and attend re:Invent. For all my misgivings about Las Vegas, re:Invent continues to be the place where the maximum number of tech people I like congregate. That alone makes it worthwhile.
I’d also like to attend DevOpsDays Philly again. I missed it in 2025 due to scheduling conflicts, but hopefully that won’t happen in 2026.
Are there other things popping up on the horizon? Sure thing. There’s a cloud native company that wants me to start building out some content for them in 2026, so I’ll be reaching out in January to start the planning process.
Beyond that, there is another O’Reilly project that I don’t have many details on. It has something to do with Linux, and that’s all I know at the moment.
If the past is any indication, there will be several other opportunities coming across my desk in the next 12 months. As always, the challenge is deciding which ones make the most sense to engage with and which ones I should pass on.
2025 didn’t exactly go as planned, but no year ever does. One of my pillars is to embrace discomfort, and the unpredictability of the future will always result in discomfort. In it’s own strange way, I find that thought comforting in and of itself.
I have no doubt 2026 will be full of challenges, opportunities, and failures. As long as I approach it with an open mind and a clear sense of purpose, I’m sure 2026 will be a great year!
January 2, 2026
December 30, 2025
Vault Provider and Ephemeral Values
July 21, 2025
Write-only Arguments in Terraform
July 15, 2025
