Veterans Day a day for Thanks

/ / @Mike_Colson, vDM30in30 / Leave a Reply

Veterans day was established after “The Great War”, WWI for those of you who don’t know it by that name. It was established to celebrate those who fought and those who gave their lives in services of their country. For the vast majority of my career I have supported the US government. I have worked with many fine young men and women in uniform and tons who have retired from service. In my family I am one of a handful that didn’t serve in the US Armed IMG_2045Services but I was raised by a Navy Chief and almost all of my uncles, my older brother and most of my male cousins were in some branch of the military.

Today is a day to celebrate the sacrifice that everyone who has ever worn a uniform has made. It is also the day to remember those that have fallen, and the families of everyone who has served.

For those that who want to support the men and women, and families that make these sacrifices, there are many organizations like Wounded Warrior, Homes for Our Troops, and the Purple Heart Foundation. For hiring managers I would recommend reaching out to the folks at Helmets to Hardhats which is a work placement organization for veterans.

Today thank a vet for their service, visit a VA center and listen to the stories of those there. Most who have put on the uniform have a pride in their country, and the simple words of “Thank you for your service” can be enough to put a smile on their face. This isn’t about tech today, today it’s about the people who give more than their share.

Thank you to all of our service people active duty and retired for all that you have done and all that you do.

Single Pane of Glass is a Unicorn

/ / Enterprise Design Considerations, vDM30in30 / Leave a Reply

I am sorry to be the one to kill your dreams, or the wishful thinking of marketing folks everywhere. I am not sure that the realists out there ever believed it was really going to come to fruition but for all of you hopeless optimists just stop wishing.

There will never be a single pane management console.

We can’t standardize hypervisors for the love of Pete. I was speaking with a customer recently who wanted to know when we would be able to deploy Hyper-V VMs on vSphere and be able to vmotion them between hypervisors without converting them. “… Uh never most likely” was my answer.

I mean look from a technical perspective it’s a matter of stripping headers so the VM doesn’t know what hypervisor it’s running on. The closest I have seen to this is what KVM does where it doesn’t care what Linux distro you are running. That’s not exactly the same thing though. OpenSource may be the best place to look for this sort of solution, but even then the odds of finding a supported single pane management? Not realistic.

Then you get into the complexity of Enterprise architectures and you quickly realize that there are very few vendors that have solved the technology silo problems well enough to standardize across all of their solutions to present a single pane even in a homogenous environment.

So all we can hope for is a mix of good tools that allow for API integration into each other so we can see the information shared across the entire ecosystem.

Put this in the category of flying cars and hoverboards as to a false reality for the future.

Mansplaining Must Stop

/ / IT Career Advice, vDM30in30 / 1 Reply

I once heard someone say “Daughters are easy when they are small, while sons are difficult but the reverse is true when they are teens.” I have one of each but they are both still pre-teen years. My daughter is now 10, and she loves computers and programming. When she has a day off from school and I am not on the road, she sits in my office on the floor and uses web based programming schools to learn and code. We are fortunate that her school is part of the hour of code program and she is naturally curious on how to make things work.

The problem is I fear her ever getting into the IT and engineering field. I have seen so much in my 15 years, and have tried to apply my upbringing to my interactions with others. I was raised that women are to be respected, and that we should treat everyone the same. Sadly this is not something that I have seen others do, or have been told how friends who are women have been treated.

Am I immune to this? Short answer is no, I am sure I have been guilty of “mansplaining”, I am a brash talker so I am sure I have used insensitive language and hurt peoples feels. I have very few feels when it comes to work so I don’t always get it.

The one place where I am overly sensitive is with my kids. My daughter in particular has me being a big softy. When she tells me a kid is mean to her, I immediately imagine my elaborate revenge.

I see a lot of emphasis being placed in recent years on women in IT, conferences, sub-conferences, and talks. I appreciate this movement, but I don’t know that it does enough. Ultimately we as men need to change our idiotic behavior. We need to stop pretending like we are better or superior, and when we see someone else behaving this way we need to say, “Dude, you are a dick.”

It needs to be called out, but not in a protective way. Don’t look at every woman in IT as your daughter. That’s just patronizing. Look at them as your peer, with the same sensitivities you have. They earned their way just like you, maybe you have something to share with them and maybe they have something they can share with you so you can both learn. But they aren’t there to be explained to, value every one equally and the results can be amazing.

Do it for yourself so you aren’t an ass, but do it for my daughter too, who one day soon will run a business because she has become a better coder than any of us in the job today.