Since Thanksgiving in the United States is tomorrow, I figured I’d take a departure from my usual blog topics and format and instead briefly discuss five things that I’m thankful for as it relates to technology in general. It seems to me that for those of us actually living out IT careers, we spend a lot more time arguing about, fighting with, and forcing our will on technology than we do actually enjoying it. After all, if it always worked super smoothly I don’t think those with an ability and proclivity to make things work would have very good career prospects.
Honestly, it’s easy to put more emphasis on the pie part of the day. I mean, have you HAD great pumpkin pie before? With homemade whipped cream?
Mmm… pie.
Originally, I was thinking this would be a “top five” things list, but ultimately I struggled to put them in order. Instead, let me just say that these are five things I’m very thankful for and they are presented in no particular order whatsoever. Each of these items could be its own blog post, but I wanted to keep this one pretty short and to the point, especially since I’ve written more on many of these topics previously, so please excuse me if I don’t flesh out every item fully.
So without further introduction, here’s my list.
To start off, I’m thankful for the multitude of free or affordable training options available now. When I got into IT, the only way to learn something was to either jump in with both feet and learn from stubbing your toes a few times or to attend an expensive training class put on by the vendor. Let me be clear: I am not knocking either of those methods. I have participated in and benefitted from both. I am simply saying that they are both either intimidating or anxiety inducing, and one of them likely costs thousands of dollars – putting it well outside the reach of many individuals. So I’m thankful for the amazing amount of content floating out in the web free for the taking in the form of blogs, YouTube channels, peer-to-peer communities, and the like. I’ve learned more about cloud from other technologists than I ever could have in a classroom. For those looking to really amp up their game, I’m thankful for the newer breed of streaming video training. These all-you-can-learn buffets are amazing, and I am jealous of anyone entering the field today – we never had that kind of on-demand learning power when I was starting out.
I mentioned the community above, and while the information available via community is an important aspect of being in a technology community it is not all there is to it. As such, community gets a nod as something I am thankful for. I recently completed a new session that I call “How to Get by Giving” (check it out on the December VMUG Virtual Event), and one of the things I talk about is how I have developed friendships all over the world as a result of my involvement in the virtualization community. And while that’s true, being a part of the virtualization community has provided me almost innumerable benefits. Access to experts, people I can lean on if I need help, and a true professional network are all benefits I’ve received because of this fabric of people who are invested in each other. Names of employers change all the time, but as one friend puts it – it’s almost impossible to be fired from the community. Being a part of the virtualization community has not only accelerated my career, but I it’s also shaped me into a better version of myself.
There’s no way this list would be complete without talking about virtualization as a technology in general. While I’m grateful for the virtualization community – I’m not sure we’d be connected at all without the technology that brought us all together in the first place. However, looking at the bigger picture, think about the transformative impact that broad acceptance of hypervisors and virtual machines brought us. Without virtualization, we wouldn’t have any cloud compute and probably not the consumption model. We for sure wouldn’t have had the kind of innovation that was sparked by being able to be untethered from rack-and-stack servers. Imagine if every system you wanted to spin up now would have required new hardware? I don’t want to live in that world. Of course, now the buzz is all around Kubernetes and cloud-native apps, but we simply couldn’t be where we are now without the transformative step of mainstream virtualization. This one technology changed the face of my career and I’m appreciative for it.
It’s access to effectively everything humanity has discovered, flying through the air
…and they give it away for FREE at coffee shops.
C’mon - you gotta be happy about that a little, right?
I’m sitting writing this in my bedroom (I don’t have a home office, as I’ve ranted about before) and I have fantastic low latency high speed access to virtually every service I need to be healthy and productive. I didn’t have to run wires for this connectivity because I (like just about everyone else) have WiFi in my house. Since we all have short memories, let me remind you that this is a relatively new phenomenon. That we have mastered the art of harnessing radio waves to send a gigabit of data across the air so that I can stream YouTube on my phone while I’m on my internet-connected elliptical machine should leave me breathless every day. I spent the time to wire up just a few rooms in my grandmother’s house when I lived with her in college to get an ethernet line from the office down to the living room so that we could have two whole computers on the network. I just checked and I have 43 devices on my home WiFi 6 mesh network. We live in the future, people. I’m thankful that I can have secure wireless access to the sum-total of human information anywhere on my property – including my shed.
Finally, while I’m on the topic of connectivity I’m immeasurably thankful for near-ubiquitous residential broadband. Living during a pandemic in 2020 when I am able to see friends, colleagues, and my team in full HD video from the safety of my own home has been a true blessing in the middle of significant chaos and disruption. I have thought repeatedly about how tough this pandemic would have been even as the mid-aughts. Can you imagine attempting to go about your life in 2005 during a pandemic like Covid? I suppose at least we had mobile phones then, but what about 1990 – almost no one had a cellphone, and no one really had anything as it relates to internet connectivity. I guess what I’m saying is that no matter how rough this pandemic has been, it has been made easier through the incredibly reliable bandwidth that I can use for video conferencing. Heck, my kids are only able to get an education at all this year because they can see their teacher live every day.
I wasn’t messing around. I’m going to go have some pumpkin pie now.
And so that wraps up my list of things I’m thankful for in November 2020. Clearly, there are quite a few more innovations, trends, and people that I’m thankful for, but if I spent time listing them all - this post wouldn’t be readable before Thanksgiving 2021. So, I’ll end it there, and go spend some time with the people I’m truly thankful for: my family.
I hope that you also get the chance to disconnect, unwind and spend some time (even if it’s virtually) with the people in your life you truly care about. Happy Thanksgiving.
Questions for reflection:
What are you thankful for in your life?
How are you showing it?
