Cloud FinOps, 2nd Edition

Afterword on What to Prioritize (from J.R.)

Ten days after the deadline for the submission of the first full draft of the first edition of this book, one of my eight-year-old twin boys died. Two of his last three weekends I spent alone in my home office editing while my wife and the boys went out on adventures to places like the Oregon Coast.

On Friday, July 26, 2019, Mike and I had made that deadline. I felt proud. I commemorated the date by writing “FinOps Book Submitted July 26” on my whiteboard at home. I posted to LinkedIn about it being submitted. Mike, who had also spent countless evenings and weekends away from his family to write the book, also posted about the milestone.

The next day, Saturday morning, I should have been playing with my boys. But after months of writing (on top of my more than full-time day job), I was back in my home office to catch up on emails. My twins, Wiley and Oliver, came in playfully while I typed away. When I didn’t pay enough attention to them, Wiley modified the aforementioned whiteboard text to read like this:

A little more than a week later, Wiley died in his sleep. Alongside the pain and grief was an overwhelming sense of regret for time with him lost to less important things. I wrote a long post on his life and death—and its impact on me. It went viral, I believe, because of its message of appreciating and prioritizing the time you ...