Celebrating Ten Years in IT: a Thank You to IT Bloggers

This month marks the ten year anniversary of when I started my first and only help desk job at The Menninger Clinic. Ten years ago straight out of school, where I had worked in the university’s IT department, but we did not use any Microsoft products. Ten years ago, starting my first job, I didn’t even know what Active Directory was.

I remember one day helping our Sys Admin cleanup the server room at Menninger, there were some SMS and MOM CDs (remember those?) laying around. I asked him what they were and he said something to the effect of some crappy MS software that’s supposed to manage things. Little did I know at the time how the successors of those products would change my IT life.

Since that day in the server room I have learned so much. From getting started with WSUS to using System Center Configuration Manager 2007 to migrate Menninger from XP to Windows 7, all while still on the help desk. Moving on to other companies learning other System Center components like Operations Manager, Orchestrator, Service Manager and Virtual Machine Manager. To learning VMware and Hyper-V and a host of other technologies, Microsoft or otherwise. And most importantly, learning Powershell.

The only thing that’s been constant in those ten years is change. Change in technology, change in tech leaders,  change in data center architecture from physical to virtual to clouds.

So what’s the point of this post? In those ten years, one company has sent me to precisely 1 formalized training. That includes the IT consulting company I worked for, for three years. This post is a thank you to everyone producing IT content and not keeping that valuable knowledge and experience to yourself. I have worked with those people and its not fun. I have had lengthy conversations a practice architect that I worked with who saw no value in doing technical blogs or presentations at community events. How you can think that, especially at a consulting company, I don’t know. However, I have learned everything I know from people that produce technical blogs and videos. Nial C Brady’s windows noob SCCM walk throughs got me through my first ever Windows migration and I don’t know what would have happened without them. And that is the reason I blog, if I can help even one person a year, a month, or ever then it’s worth it.