Up in the Air

I’m on my way to Silicon Valley to serve as a delegate for Cloud Field Day 4 (http://techfieldday.com/event/cfd4/).  Delegates aren’t industry analysts.  They are regular, in the trenches IT people who love what they do and co tribute to the community.  Many of the delegates have blogs and/ or podcasts as well as present at local user groups or trade shows.

And then there’s me... my profile is nowhere near as high as many of my peers.  But I’m going, in part, due a decision I made a few years back to put myself out there.  I got on Twitter.  I started a blog.  I tried to keep myself open to meeting people at conferences.  I joined the greater community. 

I’m just as introverted as the next person in this field (maybe even more so), so much of this isn’t easy for me.  But it is rewarding.  Maybe not financially, but being a part of any group who shares similar experiences provides comfort.  There are certain things that only people in your tribe can ever truely “get.”  Late night & weekend SAN upgrades, fixing Domain Controllers that stop controlling, migrating legacy enterprise apps from old on-prem server to the cloud - these are situations that only make sense to people in this business. 

Blog.  Tweet.  Slack.  Do whatever suits you, as long as you do something.  We all get better when more experiences are shared.