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Oct
22ndHello Again : My life up to this point
This post is a catch-up for all the stuff I should have written about but didn’t in the last few weeks. For those that don’t know, I recently moved from EMC over to VMware into a brand new kind of role. Right now I am caught in the trifecta of learning a new company, meeting new teams, and trying to help bootstrap my own with recruiting and design work. Which results in my blog getting a lack of attention. But, all that is going to change. My new mission with this blog is to just start dumping from my brain a combination of what I am playing with and what I have discovered along the way. I am working on tools and special things for the cloud community at large. But these will take a bit of time to see the light of day. So my new post will be titled: “Nick’s Distractions” – and will be a summary of mildly interesting topics that distracted me somehow during my week. So here is my first catch-up: Project Razor: Razor has exploded way bigger than I expected. Funny how solving personal problems can result in public acceptance. The current forks are over 50+ and watchers are almost 200 on the github repo(https://github.com/puppetlabs/Razor). This is just awesome, as I had always envisioned Razor as being truly powerful when it becomes a part of an open community that contributes 99.99% of the code and design. Now for the updates: 1. I was lucky [...]
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Jan
24thTop Blog Voting : Cast Your Vote
Once again the time has come in the year when vSphere-land.com does their voting for Top VMware/Virtualization blogs. I am a firm believer in voting for who you love so head over and take the quick couple minutes to choice your favorites. If something I have done on Nickapedia.com has been cool, useful, or inspiring then showing me through a vote would be awesome. Here are some of the most popular posts I have done in the last year: Celerra VSA UBER 3.2 UBERAlign – VMware Alignment Virtual Selection Fistful of Cloud (vSphere + Kinect) UBERShell (Powershell for Celerra) UBER Network Fuser (Mac OSX tool for VMware Fusion) But, even if I don’t make your list. Vote anyways – this is a great way to provide feedback to bloggers. .nick
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Jan
4thThe next iteration : What I learned & what you can expectHonestly I think the only reason I started this blog what as a holding spot for crazy things I wrote/built in my spare time. I never thought people would actually pay attention at first. Now I look back and realize that while I have stayed pretty true to that original course in some aspects, things have evolved a bit also. Going from customer, to vendor as part of sales org, to being part of engineering/R&D product development has changed my perspective and interests. And honestly I don’t know where I will end up in 2012. But I have made myself a goal for self development that I am hoping will both challenge myself and encourage others to challenge themselves. I am going to be taking on (what I call) the Manic Innovation Challenge in 2012. In simple terms and with simple rules to follow I will attempt to create something unique and creative using as wide a variety of frameworks, codebases, and presentation methods as possible. My goal is to release one example each month with a stretch goal of one example every two weeks. All this work will be in my spare time unless it is also an EMC supported example. I have a couple crazy ideas kicking around in my head and one midway to completion. I will also be starting a new series of commentary posts focused on what I see are cool trends in modern information technology at a very geek-centric level. My goal on these [...]
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Jan
4thThe late recap post : AKA Top 7 things I learned in 20112011 was a banner year for me in accomplishing great things and learning new lessons. To recap my 2011 I thought I would share: Top 7 Things I Learned in 2011 1. I must be doing something right This is the obligatory stats part of my list. Comparing 2011 to 2010 I doubled my visits, unique visitors, and pageviews. Time on site went up about 33% per visit which may just be because I cleaned up the look and made it easier to find stuff. The most interesting thing is my traffic has been much higher in the last half of this year. It is yet to be seen if I can keep this up in 2012.
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Dec
17thIT, Silos, Cloud, & You : What do you want to be when Cloud grows up?
Senior Developers, Network Admins, Virtualization Architect, Security folks, and more – in the world of skilled labor in IT there sometimes seem to be more common boxes we like to place people in than most other fields. These boxes exist partly due to the fact that the CFO/HR/recruiting folks need nicely written job descriptions to map resources and maybe a little bit because of how people assume these position – through the fires of a limited education systems and bootstrap-yanking from the bottom. Regardless of why, we organize skilled people into buckets in much the same way everyone else is world is either an accountant, attorney, marketing expert, business analyst, or any specialty therein.
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Oct
17thNote to self : Scary choices pay off
Self-reflection is something I don’t do very often. I tend to focus on the next impossible goal and not look back. But, these last few weeks I spent a lot of my time looking back. I have been thinking about what a great run I have had so far here at EMC. If you would have gone back in time and told me (relevant post : Fear and Atmosphere) that I was going to do some of the things I did in the last 1 ¾ years I would have thought you were crazy. To be honest, when I first joined the vSpecialist team I was scared to death I would fail. I was so far outside my comfort zone going to work for a pre-sales organization with a major vendor that I didn’t have a really good idea what my job would be exactly and if I could do it. Fast forward to now and I am sitting here typing on my Mac and thinking of all the impact that the vSpecialist organization has enabled for me. I have been able to move the ball with vAppliance and Virtual Storage hackery. I made a rap video extolling the tenacity of my group (which was watched by the CEO). I spoke at my first conference session (VMworld). I was able to help do things at both EMCWorld conferences that were never done before (VPLEX demo /Labs). And I released a ton of free tools that helped enable my community. [...]
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