Why this blog is going to be more active moving forward.
It started with a discussion over a few drinks
It started with a discussion at the pub over a few drinks one evening. One of my co-workers, Alex, and I were talking about where we are in our respective careers and where we wanted to get to. For Alex, he mentioned being hired by one of the big four - FANG (Facebook, Amazon, Netflix & Google). For myself, I’ve always felt that the MVP award from Microsoft is the pinnacle for someone that works with MS products, if you’re not working directly for Microsoft that is. As the MVP is given out for sharing knowledge and experience with the community, I would need to get started with that. Note that is isn’t the goal for this blog, but I hope it to be the byproduct one day.
Enter the Challenge!
How does one share knowledge and experience? Maybe by writing some articles for the blog that they started 5 months ago, sigh. Something related to the work that they do and share some of the experiences that they have. I’d like to think that I have something to provide to the community. My main issue has been discipline.
For Alex, we both felt that some recognition outside of our current employment would be a good start. This would give him some more exposure for other companies as he works his way towards being hired by one of the FANG.
So, the challenge was laid between us and another friend of ours, Matt:
- Create a blog that uses a technology that you have a professional interest in
- This blog is a static website (Jekyll) hosted on an Azure Storage Account
- It’s built using Azure DevOps pipelines
- Write about topics that you have a professional interest in
- I work in a SOE team, deploying Windows and managing the End User Experience on our corporate network
- I work primarily with MECM (nee SCCM) and PowerShell
- I’ve also worked with Group Policy, Puppet, MDT, Azure, AWS and other tools
- Write a blog post, that is shared to some form of social media by 09:00 Monday morning UTC+8 (because we’re in Perth)
Anyone that breaks the rules forfeits a six-pack of beer for the other two to consume, preferably in front of them. Presenting at a Meetup of some sort counts towards the blog post as it’s industry recognition, whereas internal presentations don’t count as they aren’t seen by the wider industry. Also, exceptional circumstances can come in to play as well.
So, there will either be more blog posts moving forward or Alex and Matt will be drinking more of my hard earned money.