Starting Up Again

After running around like crazy lately and traveling a lot, I decided it was time to put some effort into getting this blog rolling again. As anyone who blogs knows it is really tough to keep writing. But I hope with this reboot will come a drive to keep it up and keep writing.

While writing my last big post on AppVolumes I realized that install configure posts are not my thing. Way too many screenshots and I lost the desire to continue writing the post. I started to wonder why that was and remembered something that was told to me by a friend in IT about the concept of Warriors or Monks.

Warriors are the engineers who dive into the battle and can learn every nook and cranny of technology and can get anything working. They spend countless hours, doing what I call bulldogging, just stubbornly pursuing the root cause of problems, or figuring out what makes things tick.

 

 

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The monk, meanwhile are those that learn a technology and can then go and explain that technology to others. They strive to figure out what the best way is to teach and to help other monks as well as warriors see the bigger picture and how it all fits togethers.

 

For most of my career I was a warrior, during the last few years I have had to act as more of a hybrid warrior monk (think David Carradine in Kung-Fu see the pic). I think now I am probably closer to Mr. Carradine in Kung Fu the legend continues than the original series. I can still kick butt but am better at helping folks see the bigger picture. I can read white papers and understand how something works and explain it. Then put hands on it and make it work. But my job is more to explain how it works to others and help them decide where their journey should take them. There are things that I miss about being in a datacenter and working operations, I don’t have the same level of comradery  that I did working in a datacenter, any new tech I want to play with I have to find a lab to deploy into. The biggest thing I miss is some of the tempo, while things on the vendor side move fast it’s not always with the same urgency I saw when our primary power was arced by the guy changing the air filter on the generator and caused an outage. But there is a lot less stress than having to be up all night working  an outage or working through the ITIL process for a change request.

So why does any of this matter and what’s the point of this self reflection, well I will tell you friends that to blog you have to be passionate about what you write and while I do love technology I don’t like technical writing. I am way better at consuming a technology and then explaining how it fits into the bigger picture and how organizations can leverage it to meet their objectives. So that is where I am going to go with this blog moving forward. There may be the occasional product review or usability description but I will not do any more build\install write-ups I will let the folks who are good at it do that. A special thank you to my friend John Brescia of VirtixIT for the new logo, expect to see some swag very soon from it.

Hope you keep reading and I will keep writing since this is a bit of therapy for me to help me learn and work out my messaging. Thanks as always and I would love your feedback.