While I have some career details in my personal Doc, it is not that extensive, and I thought it would be interesting to have a blog post dealing with best/worst for just my IT career. This will be a series of posts where I aim to recall the milestones in my IT career. I'll start with 2010 and a few years before.
2007 Best
- Got my first IT gig (part-time) with a friend of mine who had a small IT consulting firm. I had always been technical and into computers, but this was the time I was forced to learn a lot. I installed Gentoo Linux from scratch via command line using the handbook, learned about Drupal, and did a lot of general helpdesk type stuff. My friend/boss was super helpful and taught me a bunch. He was also very patient. I remember on one occasion a task was to update some Drupal content on an offline site that resided just on a flash drive. I forget the exact details, but I made the edits and returned the flash drive as is (didn't backup the db or anything) so the work was useless! He wasn't mad though, just explained what I had done wrong. This experience ended up not only helping me identify an interest and modest strengths in IT, but also helped me to get a job at my current firm.
2008-2009 Best
- Went to grad school and helped build custom workstations for me and a colleague. Was able to get some experience with C# programming and
2008-2009 Worst
- Had a lot of opportunity to do and learn more in IT including C# programming (I shared an office with a very proficient C# programmer), and server administration, but ended up not making much of it because I was too busy driving 4 hours many weekends to see my fiancee (that was pretty important though!).
2010 Best
- Landed my first full time job as a GIS Specialist (what I went to school for), but also to assist the current GIS Manager with the IT duties. At the time I joined, the company was roughly 30 staff and had about 5 white-box workstations/servers in the back "server room" (if you could even call it that - it didn't even have AC or a locking door!). The company's email service was POP, served by a crappy host where the domain was registered (Verio.com - feel no shame in calling them out). There was no instant message system, and the calendaring system was made up of everyone having separate, individual google calendar accounts (which really sucked later when we moved to Google Apps for Business!) The management of IT was in transition between the first guy (husband of the president of the company) and the current GIS Manager and things were kind of strung together, but I didn't really know much better at the time. I was just happy to have a place to grow my IT skills while staying in a comfort zone of something I knew fairly well (GIS). I started in May and this first half a year was nice. I was kept busy on the GIS side, and learned more and more about the IT there under little pressure. It was a gentle transition into IT. I learned a lot of great helpdesk troubleshooting techniques, got to build my own workstation (with my very first SSD! - never going back to spinning disks!), and settled into my first job. No real downsides to this year that I can remember. I also married my fiancee which was a plus too!
*One of the disappointments of this task was realizing that I never exported my college email accounts. It was so fun going back into my Gmail archives which stretch back to 2004, but I had a lot more email in my school accounts that would have been an awesome time-capsule into my life back then. So export your school email accounts kids! Before the school turns them off!
