theITHollow Turns 10 Years Old

Yes, that’s right, this website is now 10 years old, and while there is no cake or ice cream for this celebration, I thought I’d take a second to reflect on what this website, and the 550 blog posts in it, have meant to me personally.

This site has in many ways chronicled my technology career, starting when I was a System Administrator, trying to learn Virtualization, up until now. I had no idea what I wanted this site to be, but I knew that I’d gained so much help from other bloggers in my day to day work, that I wanted to help out somebody myself. It seemed like the leave-a-penny / take-a-penny tray at a store. I didn’t want to only be taking penny’s out of that thing, sometimes you’ve got to be the one putting pennies in. That’s how I felt about my blog when I started.

Giving Back Gave Me Everything

After 10 years though, it’s plainly obvious to me that the real value was putting those pennies INTO the tray. Every blog post I created (and for about the first seven years this was a post per week) was an opportunity to try to teach something I’d learned to someone else. Now instead of learning something to do my job, I needed to learn it well enough to teach it. And you know what? Teaching how to use something requires much more effort than just learning the concept to complete a task.

The sheer force of maintaining this blog brought me to other opportunities in my career. I found myself in job roles as a consultant. You know what consultants do? (I’ll wait here for one more second to allow you to make your joke about what consultants do …. and now I’m moving on.) They learn how to use technology, and then figure out the best way to teach customers how to use it without making some of the introductory mistakes. Consulting and blogging actually have a lot in common, and I took A LOT of pride in being able to clearly communicate concepts to customers so that they could make the best informed decisions. Only my customers could say how effective I was at this, but I hope I was, because this was a priority of mine over the past decade.

This blog kept me looking into new technologies and building guides. Anytime I was learning something new, I started figuring out how to explain it. This lead me to many “guides” where I would look at quite a few aspects of a certain product set so that others learning it would have a guided path to learn it. When you tackle a big new subject figuring out where to start is sometimes the hard part. Here are just a few of the more popular guides, I’ve written.

Another unintended consequence of writing this blog was that I got much better at being OK not understanding things. Let me be clear, I’m still bad at this, but I will ask the “stupid” questions when I don’t understand something. Having lots of work published gave me the confidence to ask questions when I didn’t understand things. I myself, was not stupid, or broken, I just hadn’t learned it yet. Now, I ask questions all the time when I don’t understand things. I mean, I’ve written all these help documents, so it’s OK for me to ask for help when I need it right? In the end, I’ll probably teach others how its used as well.

Now, I work as a Technical Marketing Architect where my job role is to learn products, and teach them to customers, partners, and internal employees through blogs, speaking sessions, and training videos. I wonder where I might’ve learned those skills?

People

I’ve me so many great people since starting this blog. Some of them are a direct result of this blog such as Stephen Foskett, who graciously invited me to several techfieldday events. Through these events, I got to meet other delegates, and presenters from a variety of companies and disciplines. Again, the real benefit to these techfieldday events are the conversations between other delegates. Questioning ideas (respectfully, always respectfully), and discussing where things might go in the future.

Indirectly my blog has affected my career path, which has led me to meet, not only some of the best Architects, Engineers, and managers of my life, but also some of my best friends. I have a small group of technology professionals who I am very close friends with. A group of people who pick each other up when life hands them a Casino Royal style torture session. My friendships with these gentleman (who know who they are) mean an awful lot to me.

Parting Thoughts and Thank You

This blog would’ve only been a technical diary without people reading it. I don’t publish as much as I once did, but this blog still gets good traffic each and every day, and that fills me with pride. I hope people are finding the answers they seek and I’m not wasting their time (like I am with this blog post). I hope that this site has encouraged people to learn new things, and pursue their career goals. It has certainly benefited me, as you can see.

As this is vExpert season, my twitter feed included many vExperts touting their accomplishments. Good for you, and congratulations! However, there was at least one tweet that was suggesting that you get nothing good out of the vExpert program (which has now been deleted). I think their point was that you don’t really get some great swag or gift for being a vExpert. This is totally the wrong take, in my opinion. vExperts were awarded a designation for helping their peers with VMware specific technology. If my blog is any indication, the gifts were given to you by what you put back into the world, not what you got from being a vExpert. I’ve gained plenty.

To my readers, thank you so much for reading this little blog all these years.