Is Slack vs Twitter really Isolationist vs Globalism?

The ever fun @Cloud_Opinion on twitter posited a question the other day of whether folks were of the twitter or slack generation. If you haven’t heard of slack you are living under a stone and I feel bad for you kid. That doesn’t even matter right now. Cause here is the thing they are not mutually exclusive in fact I find that Slack and Twitter pose different uses. I responded with that very notion, that Slack is more localized and Twitter was far more global. What I meant wasn’t in who could access a slack channel vs follow a twitter account.

What I meant actually has a far more reaching meaning, now I don’t normally write about politics on here but I think this notion is important. You see when we look at the way we communicate today it’s not vastly different than how people communicated throughout the years back to the days of Alexander the Great building roads and schools. People find and form tribes, when they wanted to reach out to areas beyond their immediate community they would write and send scrolls. As Alexander created a network of roads merchants, emissaries, scholars and artists spread out across the lands bringing with them their own cultures. Wherever these travelers settled they shared their culture and embraced the culture of their new community this led to a meshing of belief systems and ideologies. Conquering armies, and enslaved peoples continued to spread and steal culture and time marched on as we became the countries, religions, and groups we all are today.

While nations have moved from isolationism to globalization we like to think that we as people have also globalized. We think that we are more open in our reach and views. But the truth of the matter is we tend to matriculate back to people with the same views as us. We form these tribes or communities of interests. Slack is a great example of that, a group is created and channels added so like minded people can share their opinions or collaborate. That’s awesome and well worth the time and effort put into it. Twitter isn’t that far off but it also allows for us to have open access to people of many backgrounds and points of view.

While forming a tribe and having shared interests is great, we need to be open to the travelers in the world. To see the culture, ideas, and art of others and to merge it with our own ideas. When we don’t do this we establish the framework for narrow minded thinking. If we haven’t learned anything from the past 50 years it’s that fanaticism is bred from narrow minded viewpoints and is fueled by the ignorance of cause and effect relationships of outside forces.  I am not saying Slack is a petri dish of close mindedness, what I am saying is we need multiple forms of communication and the awareness that we must seek out that which is different from our own views.

I could probably go on for a long time on this subject, because I feel so passionately about it. Do you feel you belong to enough open forms of communication to not narrow your view point? Do you find that others are too closed minded in your communication channels?

Career Ramblings and Announcements

Soccer is a game of speed and aggressiveness, especially at the youth levels. There is a great deal of strategy and mental awareness that goes into maintaining possession, playing the proper shape and moving the ball down the pitch. I coach youth soccer, two teams currently and I love every minute of it. I have also played soccer since I was a kid, and occasionally get involved in leagues as an adult.

The aggression and speed both apply to making career decisions in IT. Recently I was reading a friends blog post where they talk about their move from operations to the vendor side. With what was going on in my life it really resonated. Sometimes you need to have some inflection and look at what brought you to where you are and where you want to go. But sometimes you have to seize the opportunity in front of you and go after it like a defender attacking the ball.

I used to hire IT people and be a major part of the interview process at the past several jobs. I never asked where someone wanted to be in 5 yrs I asked, what is your career goal. Because it’s more important to understand that someone has a goal in mind. I would also look at the candidates resume and see how they had improved themselves while working at their last employer. Not just forced training but how they went out and did work on their own to gain skills.

My own move to the vendor side was a move from an Operations staff and IT reseller. It was time, but I hadn’t planed beyond that next step of moving to a vendor. I knew it was time but I had no clue what would come next. During my time at EMC I have realized that there are so many cool roles in the IT world. Some that were never exposed to me as a customer or a partner. The position of “Field CTO” was one that immediately caught my attention, and working with people like Paul Austin got me thinking that it was the path for me. I started looking at what I would need to do to obtain that goal. It came to me that experience working with product business units and taking feedback from customers to the BUs and helping to explain and shape the future of the company and product lines was going to take some work.

Ironically there was a confluence of events that led me to where I am today. But regardless of the how, I was presented with an opportunity to join SolidFire as a End User Solutions Architect and have accepted the position. The position is exciting and will challenge me, but the team I am going to work on is what I am most excited about. It reminds me of the vSpecialist team that I am leaving in a lot of ways, a bunch of type A, go getters, who work together, and understand and love community.  I couldn’t be more excited, I have to thank everyone at EMC who made my time here memorable and have taught me so much. I hope to remain in touch and to see you all at the various community events.

Blog Security

Son of a … ok talking security again I guess. I started getting worried because it appeared that my blog perma-links were redirecting. Clearly a hi-jack or so I thought, so enter reading up on word press security.

First use a hosting service for this blog, I do not try to run it out of my house, because that’s cray cray. It’s a basic WP site, with a custom theme, no biggie. I have a couple of plugins for managing comments and tracking statistics. When I found this permalink issue out I decided it was time to dig in on what security for WP was available. I settled on BulletProof Security plug-in by AITpro software.

My concern was around the ease of getting into the admin console and changing the .htaccess file. BulletProof allows you to lock the .htaccess and even replace it with a secure .htaccess. It has other benefits as well such as providing caching, securing login’s and PHP source code. Honestly it was really easy to configure and I have been happy with the locked down results.

But ironically it didn’t solve my permalink problem. What the hell? I’ve locked down everything on the blog why are the permalink’s redirecting. Then I found a link to an ancient manuscript, ok it was just an old wordpress support forum, that mentioned that sometimes permalinks get hosed up and simply changing to a custom permalink structure will fix the issue. Boom its fixed like FM from the sky.


Well then … sometimes it’s the simple stuff I suppose security made relatively easy. What are your tips and tricks for securing your blog?