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Oct
30thNext Level : 5 Rules for a Rookie Tech Leader:
At this point in my career something weird has happened. People look at me expecting me to answer questions. They expect me to hack my way through the jungle of technology and find a path to business value. They expect me to lead. Or in other words: at sometime in the recent past, I transferred from a contributor – to a leader. But, I am not an executive or a PhD. I am not a battle hardened veteran of a dozen product launches. I am not on any boards, I have not written any books, and I do not walk into a room with every single person knowing my name. What I have done is build a reputation for executing where it is difficult. I have demonstrated my passion for technology and my love for problem solving. I have shown that I love talk to people about tech as much as building tech. And through all this I find myself in an interesting position. There is more riding on my shoulders than ever before. But more than that; there are really good, hard working, and intelligent people that are looking to me to help them achieve success. Which means I can now fail more than just my family or myself. Which is a much more serious place to be. Out of this I have been trying to ensure that I am not just the Special Forces style engineer. I do not just drop in, kill all the problems, and then [...]
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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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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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Feb
11thManic Innovation Challenge(Feb) : UBER Twitter Stats
UPDATE : As of last week UBER Twitter Stats are offline. The account used for replying to requests was tagged as spam and blocked. I don’t plan on moving to a new account. Instead I am going to work on a replacement which should rock even more. Continuing my pursuit of the Manic Innovation Challenge I am proud to release my newest *dumb* idea: UBER Twitter Stats! NEW UPDATE – Based on some tips (thanks: Brian Katz @bmkatz) some of the details haved changed below to make UBER Twitter Stats work a little easier. The same old command style still works. But the newer one is much easier. Written in 100% Ruby and running in the cloud, UBER Twitter allows you to ask me (technically my cloud-like proxy @myubertwit) for interesting recent stats about your Twitter account. It is really quite simple. Send a tweet to my app account (@myubertwit) with the text: “<command>”. With the command being one of the following: My Word Count – Will reply with the top 20 words you used recently. This automatically strips out very common words. Shortcut: ‘mwc’ Mention Word Count – This will reply with the same as the above but for tweets that mention or are to you. Shortct: ‘mmwc’ Who I Mention – This will list the top 20 people you talk to or mention in your recent tweets. Shortcut: ‘wim’ Who Mentions Me – This will reply back with the top 20 people who have mentioned you the most lately. [...]
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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
11thQuick Update : UNF version 1.701I got some feedback that some users running Snow Leopard were crashing every time they started UNF. Turns out there was a method being used on a Cocoa control that required changes made in the 10.7 SDK. I rewrote the function to not need the method and have released a new version (version 1 build 701). All download links are updated but you can download the new version here: UBER Network Fuser 1.701 Download Lion users don’t need to update. Thanks, .nick
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