This closing keynote from the LabMan Conference (held at UNT in Denton, TX) follows the conference's theme of "sustainability" by discussing how to sustain one's career.
and requested. — Feel free to take photos or videos of today's presentation and share them online — If you use Twitter, feel free to tweet about this session (use hashtag #LabMan2015 or handle @LabMan2015) — A PDF copy of this presentation will be available online after the event 2
is different than sustaining your skills — This is about sustaining your ability and capacity to learn, grow, and adapt — This is about sustaining your ability to deal with and manage change 6
balance" — Pursue learning outside of your career — Prolonged bilingualism can improve cognitive skills (see http://www2.uwstout.edu/content/lib/thesis/ 2008/2008boesen.pdf) — This may be true for music and various other hobbies as well (no conclusive evidence yet) — Avoid burnout 9
(GTD is one example) — Stop managing e-mail and start processing e-mail 1. If you can do it in less than 2 minutes, do it. 2. If it takes more than 2 minutes, put it in the trusted system. 3. If you need the information in the message, archive it. 4. Otherwise, delete the message. — Stop using your inbox as a "to do" system---that's not what it is! 11
cloud-centric world — The non-technical skills are, in fact, more important than technical skills — Early 2013 IDC white paper (available from http:// www.microsoft.com/en-us/news/download/presskits/learning/ docs/idc.pdf) lists some important skills sought by hiring managers 13
Find out the goals of the business, and think about how IT can help achieve those goals. — Don't use IT jargon: The business doesn't care about IOPS, RAM, GHz, TB/PB, SAN, NAS, NFS, or VTEPs. They care about meeting their goals. — Try to say "Yes": Don't tell the business "No"; instead, tell them what it would take to solve their problems. 16
management 3. Project/program management 4. Business-IT alignment 5. Technical skills in cloud implementation The proof point for this list is the strong adoption of... 18
skills could be considered part of DevOps — Consider the "Three Ways of DevOps" (http://itrevolution.com/ the-three-ways-principles-underpinning-devops/) — The First Way: Systems thinking — The Second Way: Amplify feedback loops — The Third Way: Culture of continuous experimentation and learning 21
to the business, you must understand how these cloud services work — Major providers include Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and VMware — Most (if not all) of these providers have "free tiers" that make it easier for you to experiment and learn how they work (and what their value is) 28
consider: — Compute (EC2, Azure, GCE) — Storage (Dropbox, Box, S3) — SaaS — XaaS (DRaaS via vCloud Air, DBaaS, etc.) — Each of these may offer value to your organization 29
evolving — Linux is increasingly pervasive in all aspects of the data center — OpenStack is a leading open source cloud management framework — Open vSwitch is a key open source networking project — Not to mention a whole host of other open source projects, like... 30