PSPowerHour Episode 12 With Sarah Lean: From pushing server cage nuts to pushing code

[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] lean cloud op advocate at microsoft um we're doing a power hour today and uh sarah will be giving her presentation about uh server nuts to beyond in the cloud um so uh i'm john jannell i'm the associate director and principal i.t architect at western washington university james petty hey yeah guys so uh i'm james the president ceo of the devops collective and i think this is week number 20 for us i think episode 10 or 11 or something like that yes we're excited to have you sarah thank you for inviting me it's fun to be here yeah now obviously for those watching it for those watching at home uh sarah has kind of an accident sarah where are you from um i'm from just outside glasgow in scotland awesome i think we had we had josh king with us last week he was from the other side of the world over new zealand so that was a lot of fun multinationals we try doing our best all right so us yes so sarah what are you going to talk to us about yeah and about my career journey from um like john said from pushing server cage nuts to actually pushing code um in this new cloud world that we all um can operate and all right well um i guess we don't have any questions for those of you watching at home if you've got any questions feel free to put them in the twitch chat or if you're in social events and the powershell slack and or discord uh you can put them there's uh put that together as well if not we'll uh turn it over to sarah here awesome thank you um so yes today's presentation is about pushing server cage nuts to pushing code so let's start off with my career and where i started so i am went to university and got a computing degree and then i moved into my first role and that was in a first level help desk role and that was um like you you probably know first level help desks that is answering the phone and dealing with people resetting passwords and all of those kind of fun things and yes i have had that phone call where someone said um my monitor isn't working and after a few questions i realized what they were actually trying to tell me was that the power in the building wasn't working that morning and that's why it wasn't working so um yeah i had all of that fun and um it definitely actually was fun to be honest i know i sound quite right there but it was a fun experience because i learned how to interact with customers i learned how to um triage their issues um over the phone because when i did this there was no things like video um calls built into your pc there was no webcams it was all through phone calls and some of it maybe was through email and so you definitely had to learn your communication skills your customer service skills in order to translate all of the technical wording that i had and all of my technical knowledge into something that the other the end user would understand um and again without being disrespectful the people on the other end of the phone didn't have the same technical experience as me so seeing something even just as simple as a task bar to them might not have made anything to them so i had to really understand and use my language and use my words to help them fix that problem and try and diagnose it as well so i spent several years doing that learning my trade on the help desk and i also moved into second level roles which saw me moving away from um being struck on the telephone and actually being able to go out to customers and actually speak to them at their desks and that was a lot of fun as well and i did um you know have to deal with printers and printer jams and toners exploding on me and so there was a different level of fun when i moved to that second level role um and i think this picture of you know um have you tried turning off and on was very much true in that area of my career but it was great fun and it did teach me a lot what i learned as well is that there's a lot of variety of different technologies um on board and um on your screen you'll see things like exchange server we've got windows server 2008 windows 7 um active directory printers all of those are core services and if we think about it today those those core services are still existing yes we shouldn't be using server 2008 anymore hopefully no one's using that anymore even though it's end of life but we still use servers right and server 2016 or 2019 that core technology is still very much there so what i learnt there um is still very much relevant today and again operating system has changed windows 7 and again we hopefully aren't using that anymore and but it's still still a core thing that we need to interact with whether it be a windows operating system or a mac os we're still using those operating systems so the variety that i got and when i was in these first and second level roles really helped me understand and my whole career they really built that that solid platform of where i started off with and moved forward with and it was great fun right like i said paper jams toners exploding um electricity faults happening and people phoning up the i.t help desk expecting them to fix them as well um but after cutting my teeth in those first and second level type roles i moved on to being a third level support engineer or a consultant and that saw me move into the realms of fixing the really big problems and that were happening having to really deal with some outages within the organization or even actually designing solutions for the customers and i worked in various different roles er sorry companies for this so sometimes i was working within a larger organization who had just had an it department and then sometimes i was working for managed service providers who were providing support to other customers and that was another um transition for me as well working in a managed service provider because no longer did i have that rapport of maybe seeing the people i was speaking to on the phone walking through the lunch hall i would never get to meet some of these people that i was supporting and designing solutions for so again hopefully all my customer service skills that i'd learned and my first and second level roles really played through and helped me build up those relationships and build up that trust for the consultancy role and the managed service provider as well but i also was able to pull on all those things that i learned from those earlier roles and when i was designing solutions and systems i was able to take in some of the things that were pain points even just for me so things like naming conventions that were completely off and wrong and how to deploy a server where things had to be how you had to separate the roles on servers and just make things a little bit better and a little bit easier as well even things like role access as well so making sure that help desk people had access to them some of these servers but not full admin access so that they could accidentally do something but they could actually help us in our role and not have to pass so many faults along the chain as well so lots of things were learned and hopefully and put into um that third level and that consultant-seeking architecture role as well now i spent a lot of time in the server rooms that is absolutely where i was now these are none of my pictures i found these online because i can't find all of the the horrible pictures that i took off some of the data centers that i spent time in but i did spend a lot of time in these data centers and these hot cold io type m data centers i also spent um time working for a whiskey company here in scotland and one of their buildings was actually an old farmhouse so yes i have sat on old concrete in this really cold building trying to fix phone faults as well so plethora of opportunities to work in that data center and hardware really was something that i enjoyed and i could name off um you know what an hp server or a dell server if you gave me the number or the you know the the type of server that was and what we could actually do with that i could tell you you could put so many gig of ram in it or this server wasn't great because of the speed of the hardware i knew all of that off by heart i was a proper geek when it came to some of that stuff but after a while to be honest i was starting to realize that that wasn't the way forward for it you know three or four years ago maybe even five or six if we think about it actually going back now i'm starting to see a transition people were actually starting to talk about things like um office 365 and moving even just their email away from being an on-prem solution to something in the cloud and that's when i started to think that maybe i needed to change my direction or upskill and add something to my career and that's when i started to think about changing my job roles and because the jobs i was in were fully focused on on-prem solutions so i took a leap of faith in 2017 and joined this really small company here in glasgow who were fully focused on the cloud all they did was implement cloud solutions either in office 365 or microsoft 365 as we refer to it today and some azure things as well now they already had an engineer in their company but he wasn't born in the cloud engineer he never felt the pain of having to deal with server 2008 he'd never looked at windows server he'd never do it with a physical server if i'll be told so i was really coming on board to help him and that transition and being able to translate what our customers had into what we were going to try and uh put it into in terms of um microsoft e65 or azure solutions as well so we were really working together in tandem and sharing our knowledge and designing solutions going forward as well now as i said the first thing that i actually did within the cloud was an office 365 or a microsoft 365 move and i think probably speaking to some of my colleagues that's probably where most of us have actually started with the cloud solutions moving that exchange server and from exchange 2007 exchange 2010 however it may be up into office 365 and just moving that one workload now there's a lot more to office 365 than email um and that's where we started to actually leverage some of um the business value or the value add that you can have around 365 getting people to implement office 36 sorry sharepoint getting them to look at onedrive for shared files and just being able to comment communicate and collaborate a bit better using some of the technology that they had now available to them now the email was being moved up into there so yeah that was the first thing i ever did in a cloud and that was moving in people to 365 and hopefully um driving the adoption of how to use some of the collaboration tools now the first ever azure topic or project that i worked on was an iot project now i'll be entirely honest see when this project came across my desk i didn't even know what iot stood for i was like oh my god what is this why is my boss giving us this and this is completely out of my comfort zone and i'm going to fail completely and i'm going to have to give up my tea forever and go and look somewhere else and do something else completely different however i kind of gave myself a little shake and realized that this was an opportunity to try and learn something new and actually work in the cloud and do something a bit outside of my comfort zone so what we had had in this project was a customer who had to measure the temperature of a fridge on their office space and then be able to report on that so be able to tell someone um if they were audited what temperature that was and how long it was and and all those kind of things that go around being audited for your fridge temperatures the solution they had was all on-prem it was really unreliable it constantly needed a restart from the it department they had to go and kick the server every now and again to make it work the end users that were actually dealing with the fridge and the components within the fridge and couldn't access the data so they had to log a help desk ticket with their it team to getting that data which was really cumbersome again so if they were being audited they had to log a ticket and then wait for the help desk to get round to actually getting them the data back so it was a horrible solution for them even though it was a solution so what we did was install um iot sensors into the fridge we then used iot hub on azure we use stream analytics we use cosmos db and a better power bi to try and pull all of that data store it all and make it be visualized and for the end users as well there was lots of lots of sleepless nights and trying to figure out how all this worked um because like i said i'd never done iot before and never used something like cosmos db before completely different from any of the relationship relational databases that i'm used to so my sql queries were all out the window um and again a lot of this technology back maybe even in 2007 to those 2007 tori in 2018 was brand new so there was not a lot of documentation and then the documentation gave you just the bare minimum that you needed to get started with so like i said there was lots of sleepless nights and lots of late nights trying to get this solution working but i'm pleased to say that we actually did get a solution up and working for the customer so hopefully i think they're still using it today but it was really a learning curve for me in order to understand that yes i could actually figure out some of this cloud stuff and i wasn't completely out of my depth and i could actually move forward with my i.t career now the second project that i ever worked on in azure was something a little closer to home and something that we've probably all implementing in some shape or form across our i.t departments and that's a backup and disaster recovery project um and this was a lot easier and i kind of wish that this had been my first um project within azure but it was really again upgrading a customer who had an on-prem backup solution so they had in their headquarters here in the uk and they had offices in dubai and they had offices in asia as well now all the it department was based here in the uk so they were absolutely fine they were changing their backup tapes they were maintaining it they had a company to take the off-site tapes all of that was absolutely fine but the issue was in dubai and in asia they didn't have a dedicated ite person so they were really relying on someone in the office to be able to manage those tapes and tapes were going missing tapes were getting broken tapes were getting left in people's handbags or at homes so it really wasn't a reliable situation that they were in so they wanted something that we could actually operate from the uk so the it department here in the uk could control it but they also had obviously that peace of mind with backup in place and that's where we introduced them azure backup for them and that worked fine and let's face it any backup technology is pretty much the same regardless of who makes it um you point it at your workload you back up every night you back up every seven days every 30 days and every year right that's the kind of solution that you can use so that wasn't daunting at all to me yes i had to learn some new things and how to point things where and and finger figure out things like azure data centers and azure regions and costing and retention policies and all of that but we were able to implement that now the second part of that project was actually putting disaster recovery in place and again they didn't have anything reliable so we looked at azure site recovery now we might manage to get azure site recovery working in the uk for our customers but at the time because there wasn't any azure regions in dubai or asia that could really meet our um kind of latency issues that we had and um data residency issues as well we didn't get it implemented there and now when you probably look at the azure data centers we have one in dubai and we have some in asia more as well so you could probably go back and revisit that and i hope that the customer is actually going back and revisiting that and implementing it as well but again it was another familiar topic and two to me because again disaster recovery is all about being able to um recover from a disaster um so you have to have um your major systems backed up or protected and then a methodology for bringing that back up in a plan so again i was more confident actually working on this project and working forward and again it reiterated to me that i could take all the skills that i had and actually implement them in the cloud they were still very much relevant even though i was learning new interfaces i was still able to actually you know and take those skills that i'd had learned as well so again another great project for me to cut my teeth on as i said in this role the person i was working with um was a born in the cloud engineer he'd never touched um hardware on prem so we were both helping to mentor each other so um often like i said when then when we're doing those office 365 migrations i was able to relate to some of the on-prem technology the exchange technology the servers the hardwares the weird stuff that customers had implemented to make their printers work through their email system all of that i was able to help translate into the cloud and he was able to help me figure out some of the cloud terminology so we were basically mentoring each other and then being the mentee as well so that was a great um transition for us and i think that's something to remember that we can learn something from each other regardless of how many years we've been in the it industry or what or what our specially a speciality is as well now this actually led me on to forming the glasgow as your user group and i wanted to learn more about the cloud and i needed to bounce some ideas off more people than just my colleague and in the office um but there wasn't a user group um in scotland the only user group at the time for azure was in london and glasgow and london are not commutable i think it's about 500 miles so it definitely wasn't going to be something i was going to be attending regularly so that's when i started up the glasgow as your user group and it's been a great ride and to be honest it's taught me a lot it's taught me about how to publicly speak it's taught me about things like photoshop designing logos building websites again there's been a ton of things that has taught me it's also helped me um you know meet new people get new friendships get new network connections hear lots of new things and technologies that some of our speakers come and people in the audience talk about as well so if you haven't um attended an azure user group and i know it's maybe a little bit harder now with the current situation um but there's a list online of the user groups that are operating around the world so you should be able to find one that's in your region that's hopefully operating virtually and you can still attend because these community events are massively impactful and they have been for me as well now operating in the cloud requires you to start to look at um coding um and as an infrastructure person who is died in the wool hardware person i loved gooeys and that was exactly where i'd spent all my time i just used a little bit of powershell because um i think it was exchange 2007 microsoft took away some of the interface and you had to do things within powershell so i dabbled in it a bit i had some scripts i had a bit of knowledge um i was sometimes that person who would take a powershell script off the internet and run it in production environments because you know who who doesn't do that but um when we started to actually um look at azure and started to look at office 365 things were starting to get a bit more code heavy and i started looking at how to use empower shell to do automated deployments how to deploy arm templates um and then there was also obviously the bash so azure cli now again this is great where my colleague and i kind of worked together and taught each other a bit because he'd never used powershell and he was a bash person um and again we were able to kind of have a lot of competitions every now and again where i would sit down and try and automate something as a powershell script and he would try and do it in a bash script um and back then there was massive disparities between the two languages and you could do some things in powershell with you couldn't do in the cli and vice versa so we really taught each other a lot about that and to be honest i think i actually prefer cli nowadays into doing some things it seems a bit quicker and it seems a bit more intuitive so yeah that i have had to go into the coding world i'm still not an expert but i know how to dabble in it and i don't think there's a day where i don't fire up visual studio code and to write a bit of code or to try something out or execute something on azure so um yeah unfortunately um for those people who are infrastructure people and love gooeys like me you're gonna have to learn a bit of coding um when you're working in the cloud and that's just the way it is unfortunately but it's also led me into automation and again devops isn't something i thought i would ever deal with it's not something i ever thought i would have to deal with um i always put it down as a developer only type 2 or methodology and not something i would have to look at and now my blog is all devops so i write my blog in yamo in visual studio code i push it up into my repository in devops and there's some testing that happens out to make sure i've not completely broken the code before it gets deployed out it gets deployed out to a test web app and then gets deployed out to the production one so um i've got automation in place for even just my web blog um so it's something that again i'm not massively expertised in but i can dabble in and i understand the technologies i understand what an azure board is within azure devops i understand pipelines and releases and again not my specialty area but i understand the concepts and can talk a bit about it and i can also um relay those conversations between customers to my colleagues who are more experienced in devops but again automation is a big thing that we're going to have to go into and let's face it automation saves us from doing those mundane tasks that we all hate doing and allows us to actually get into using some of the cooler stuff that i know is available within the cloud now another thing i didn't think i was going to have to figure out was get i again thought this was a developer technology didn't make any sense to me i'm like no all my code is stored in a word document or on my onedrive or on a usb i don't need to know this language get i don't need to know it um and i tell you that i now write blogs about get because it's something that i use on a daily basis and and it's been really useful again i'm not an expert i often have to look up a search engine for some of the commands or go into the help of the command to find the right one but again it's something that i now use and i think we all have to be able to use a little bit of it and understand the benefits of it understand the disadvantages of it as well but get is a way of being able to interact with things like github and again i was writing documentation that's going to be on the official microsoft documentation and that's all hosted on github so you have to have a bit of knowledge about github and get and understand all of these things and interact with them because that's the world we now unfortunately live in so if you don't learn some of these technologies you are unfortunately going to be left behind a little bit um but like i say you don't have to be experts in them you just have to know some of the basics and be able to get along and and do your job basically for it now i'm massively still learning i'm like i said not an expert on a lot of these technologies but i'm getting there and i'm building up my um skill set and adding to it all the time this um led me to my job at microsoft and so i actually met someone at the glasgow azure user group who worked for microsoft and thought i would be a good fit for a microsoft role and i became a cloud solution architect at microsoft in i think it was january 2018 um and i did did that role for quite a while and i enjoyed that role because it was allowing me to interact with bigger customers larger scale customers and designing solutions in azure for them it was scary at times because these are massive um companies that you'll all know the names of and i was designing solutions for them in azure but it was a great step forward and i like i said the user group has enabled me to do lots of different things and i met someone who helped me get my dream job at microsoft however in october 2019 i got the chance to become a cloud advocate at microsoft and this is the role i'm still doing today where i get to evangelize and talk about the technologies and help the community and kind of go on a journey that i've been on as well so i help write blog posts i help write documentation i speak at events i um create presentations at conferences i help everything around all of that and it's it's great fun um i think if you told me about five years ago i wouldn't be i died in the world techie and doing technology and deploying technology and and that and i said i would say it wasn't something that was going to happen um but to be honest i love em sharing and teaching and helping others on the journey and it's been great fun this cloud advocate role um i am still a technologist though i'm still earning all of my certifications i am still going through the exams i've learnt a bunch so i've got my azure exams i think they're actually due to expire so i need to re-certify for them and but i'm still dabbling in other things like the data fundamentals i've done the ai fundamentals which i to be honest was actually probably the most fun funnest is that even a word um exam that i've done um and the power platform as well which is a whole other realm that we're having to look into as well nowadays so yeah i'm still doing all of that as well um as as doing the cloud advocate evangelism role as well now as i said um user groups are a great way of me keeping up to date with everything that's happening there's so much happening in the world um and being able to connect with people who could maybe help you um going to these presentations listening to them even just listening to the ones that happen at the glasgow as your user group really helped me and keep my skills up to date and again build up my network so that if i have a question about something i know that you know gregor knows that something who because he spoke about that at the user group and i can ping him and ask him um for a cheeky favor to help me explain something so build up your network attend these user groups attend events like this one on twitch as well because they will help you build up your network and probably hopefully teach you something that you didn't know before the session now i also use twitter quite a bit and there's some hashtags that i follow in order to again build up my knowledge to keep up to date with everything that's happening there's a whole plethora of hashtags these are just the ones that i use and during my daily work um to keep me up to date but again any suggestions for hashtags that you use or um know of like let me know because um these are invaluable to trying to um drown out some of the noise that often happens in twitter and you can really focus down on the stuff that you're wanting to look at now i use microsoft learn for um a lot of my learning material um my robot as a cloud advocate sometimes is to create um learn um you know documentation and stuff like that and the courses that happen on there but i also use it to help me train i used it to help me um study for the ai fundamentals exam and the power platforms um exam as well so there's really useful um information on microsoft learn and it's completely free now it also has a sandbox built into it so if you want to use things like azure but you don't want to pay for it because we don't always want to pay for um some of these technologies um it has a free sandbox that you can actually use in there so you can press some buttons you can deploy some resources as part of the learning modules and you don't have to pay for it so you can get that hands-on learning for free as well now another great website and that i also use and to have a look at is the azure heat map or the azure chart website um and what this is is there's actually a bunch of resources on this but the bit that i like the most is the heat map so what you what it does is collect all the news that's been happening um over the last seven days 30 days and that kind of stuff and you can distill down what's been happening so if you've been on holiday for seven days and you come back and you're like no idea what's been happening need to catch up in the news you can go on this website and it'll show you this really cool heat map and you can see that the the grids here so things like um cost management have just had an update in the last seven days so you can go and read on that and you can keep up to date with that so it's a great one to bookmark and there's other resources in there as well on it as well so i think there's a quiz on there and there's stuff about the slas and it's outages and stuff like that it's not an official website it is something that a microsoft colleague has created but it's another great resource so it's definitely one to be bookmarking as well so certifications um there are a lot that are relevant to it pros um i know contentiously we don't have any windows server exams at the moment um it's something our team and i are fighting for but there are some certifications in the azure realm and office 365 realm that actually can help you on your itpro journey so not all the certifications in azure are about developers as well now i wanted to include these slides because i often get asked if the on-prem skills translate to what the cloud world looks like nowadays and i absolutely say yes um you have to understand how these two worlds interconnect because a lot of times companies and organizations are going with a hybrid solution so having the knowledge of what on-prem looks like and what cloud looks like helps you um being able to understand the best decision and where you can put potentially workloads for your organization if you don't have that understanding of both platforms you may struggle with going forward and kind of picking the best solution for your um organization so absolutely still on-prem is still relevant cloud is still relevant and being able to mix the two together is very much where i think we're going to have to go nowadays in a in a hybrid cloud world there are some things that i think you should be focusing on um automation big one like i said earlier on it enables us to to away from those mundane tasks and actually get to use some of the fun things optimization the way and we pay for our it solutions nowadays is changing so being able to optimize and understand how all of that works and be more efficient with your budget is going to benefit you and your organization greatly connectivity monitoring security knowledge there's a whole spectrum of skills that you need in order to work this hybrid cloud world so lots to learn lots to figure out and lots to translate from the on-prem world as well so that's me tonight um thank you for letting me ramble on about my career talk and there are some resources and to help you go and learn some of the things that i mentioned um on screen at the moment if you go to ak dot ms slash career slash talk dot resources i think that i've totally read that wrong but hopefully you can see it on the screen um and there's lots of resources there like i said to um learn about some of the things i've talked about and also some of my contact details as well um hopefully that's been useful um if you've got any questions please do let us know and i can happy to take some of those questions all right checking the chat here to see what we have uh so i guess if you guys watching if you have a question you want to want us to pass along to sarah we'll be happy to do that yeah so sarah i have a i have a question for you um bro and first thanks for the presentation a lot of information there i'm really excited to follow up with the azure heat map as just a place to direct people and like hey if you're curious about what's going on that's awesome so thanks i got something out of it um i noticed throughout your career uh you you had a pretty solid trajectory i mean of course it looks like a straight line in a presentation um and we all perfect careers yeah how did you stay motivated at each one of those stages i think i tried to find something that was going to be fun to learn if i'm honest um try to to break it into little subjects like i know i said i didn't enjoy the iot or i didn't really want to do that project but you know what it was a fun project to actually get into and focus on and like i said i spent a lot of my time even outside of work trying to get that solution dialed in because it was fun and it was something completely out of my comfort zone it was something new to me and i was wanting to overcome it i'm the type of person that can't leave a project unfinished i need to you know complete that project and so i think i tried to find things like that just to focus on and that's probably as well why i started the glasgow as your user group to keep my motivation going because i would be you know hearing other people and other people would be relying on me to keep that project going and we've been running the glasgow user group for over three years now so um there's something new every day in itu right and i think that's that's the challenge and trying to find something that motivates you um is is part of it i think that does that answer your question or have i just rambled no i i think it's interesting because uh you know your don jones famously said famous or not is that you own your career your company owns your job um and i think it's interesting when i when i talk to students about you know they they view any successful career professional is like well it must be magical and you do things like that and i'm like i think it mostly boils down to like renewing yourself and then committing to something again and keep that forward momentum um so just i always want people to share their stories because it's not a straight line and there are things that happen that are challenging and there are things that happen that go so smoothly that you like i'll do that again thank you very much um you know uh so i also noticed about the presentation is that you did a lot of things and i know from meeting some other cloud ops advocates that it's a very blended position with a lot of different responsibilities and i know many of us struggle especially in today's world with uh how we juggle things and how do we wear so many hats do you have any tips on how to stay good at switching hats um it is hard i'll be honest it is hard doing that what i do personally is two things um i block out my calendar in outlook so i have um sections time today for example i'd like three hours to work on a blog post and then i had a meeting um and then i had more time to work on a video series that i'm working on so i blocked out that hour if i leave my diary empty what i find is i don't get to the tasks that i i'm supposed to complete by the end of the week and i also color code my diary so things are all color coded so it looks it looks like a mess if you were to look at my diary but it makes sense to me because i can see that the orange things are community events or um the red ones are internal team meetings that i might not have to miss um i can't skip those um you know blue ones are team meetings i could maybe skip um so things like that can help um organize me i also still do that whole and writing a to-do list on a notepad like traditional pen and paper and i know we have things like to do and we have lists and stuff like that and we can have you know i can right click on outlook items and turn it into a to-do item and stuff like that but that doesn't work for me it i forget to look at that to be honest or it's in a layer i go dismiss and forget all about it whereas if it's on a bit of paper i can tick it off or i can cross it out and at the end of the week i can see where i've i've achieved something and would have not achieved something and then i can start my to-do list for the next week going forward so for me that's how i do it i have to be regimented otherwise i am going to lose hours on twitter or on instagram or youtube watching completely irrelevant things and going down the hole that you go with social media and often um even during my work hours i hope my boss isn't watching this but um yeah i regiment my calendar i have things blocked out i have um exercise blocked out i have lunch blocked out um i have you know 5 p.m most days i'm like right time to get off blocked out go log off and stop working so for me that's the two things i do organize my calendar and write down to-do lists and that helps me okay so organization is is huge and applicable to all sorts of jobs so it sounds like you have a really well it is a great system i'm jealous i have color-coded calendar events but i'm not quite to that level but hey um how did you get there i mean like was it an epiphany or you know it was a charismatic event that you went to because i mean again i'm a big one-note fan because i went to a couple ignite sessions uh stole hanson did and i'm like this is the best thing ever and it changed a lot of things but how did you get there with your organization um by not being organized i was missing deadlines i was stressing myself out i was working till all hours at night trying to match things i was accepting meetings from some of the teammates that work in seattle or australia at weird hours and it just wasn't a great a great solution for me because i was i'm not going to say burning out because i wasn't at that stage i don't think but i was just becoming a bit frazzled and you know i wasn't having that work life balance that we all trying to have so um yeah it was more a mistake that i ended up being organized it was just something that i ended up doing because um yeah i wasn't doing it right if i'm honest at the first when i first joined um so yeah well i think that's good to hear because i mean we again we assume that everybody's got everything locked down and things are going it's going well so it's always thank you for sharing that so appreciate the honesty um and i thought it was really cool how you were motivated enough to start the glasgow user group another thing that i noticed was your discussion about the mentor-mentee relationship that you had at your employer um how did that start was it you know i got this challenge or or what prompted you to have that because that's that's really interesting um i think it was just our different skill sets and my colleague was cloud only like i said he'd never touched a server he'd never even you know taken a laptop apart to put in ram or take out the hard drive you know the things that for me at least i take for granted um and you might be the same because i know you you do a lot of that obviously in your work so i had all these skills um that he didn't have and then he had all these skills about azure and you know iot and i ai and stuff i hadn't even heard of to be honest um and we were able to bounce him off each other and and we'd often go to customer meetings and they would be saying oh we have um this issue with our own prem environment you know the exchange server and stuff like that and things that i was like oh yeah i know how to fix that um and we were there to put in like azure solutions or even fix the on-prem environment if i'm honest in some cases um so i was teaching him some things because he didn't understand what that was and he didn't know how to solve it and bits of software i'd heard of he hadn't heard of so it was really just one of those things we unfor like um fell into i i'd love to say it was conscious and we we actually made that decision to mentor each other but it was just something that we we fell into naturally because of our skill sets and but like i said it's definitely something you should try and do in your environment you know um if there's someone who's maybe an older person this is going to sound terrible within the environment who's maybe got a wee bit more experience go and talk to them go and bounce ideas off them and you know hopefully you'll be able to you know learn something from them and they'll be able to learn something from you um because we don't know all i know sometimes people think even the cloud advocates know everything but we we don't i'm sorry to birth that myth but um yeah we don't so personally i'm crushed uh so i'll soldier on a little bit uh so this is this is going to be kind of a woolly question so my cloud environment is hybrid okay i i term it public and private cloud i think that is a good way of talking about that um and i think there's a heavy focus on hybrid and that's great because i think it applies to a lot of customer experiences applies to mine um if you were going to look through a crystal ball when do we see the translation between or the transformation we'll call transformation uh between you know on-prem hybrid and then cloud only is there a tipping point where we're going to see it's no longer i guess maybe a little bit dismissed because it says cloud only because only it's a bad phrase um but when is it just that's what it is well of course you're running that in the cloud are we are we five years out 10 years out i probably say we're probably maybe more closer to the 10 years out to be honest um i'm hearing lots of stories from colleagues and peers in previous jobs who are still running on-prem environments right now even in this current covered world where we're all trying to work remote and we're all having to make things work so that people can vpn and or dial in or citrix in or however you want to do it some people are aren't using the cloud for that and some people are still expanding hardware on-prem um some people are building out citrix environments vdi environments on-prem and not because they have like ins you know constraints around where their data needs to live or audit requirements is because they haven't had the skills they don't they don't know how to go that fast they don't have to use it because they're still stuck in um on-prem world unfortunately and that's an unfortunate thing for a lot of organizations because they get stuck in that business as usual cycle of just fixing problems with desktops with the current hardware and they never the staff never get a chance to say like stop i'm not going to do this this week i'm going to go and learn about the cloud i'm going to learn about azure and i'm going to figure this out and try and see where we can get the benefits they're too busy running on that kind of treadmill or fixing what's on prem and they're getting left behind unfortunately um so yeah i think there's still a lot of work that needs to be done within not only i.t but i think businesses culturally you know and the people that make the decisions the business owners need to think a bit more about ite because it's often the thing that gets left behind right they see it as an expenditure and they don't see it as something that is worthwhile within the environment it doesn't have any return on investment you know your sales department your marketing department you know you can spend money in those departments and actually get a return you can see where your money's been spent often people think you just spend money on i.t and there's no benefit to it at all but as i.t professionals we know that there's a massive benefit and it does you know if it wasn't there they wouldn't be able to do half the things that they needed to do so i think there's a lot of cultural change that still needs to happen outside of the i.t department before we even get to our cloud-only world um if i'm if i'm being honest so 10 years so one of the other things is that you were you started to talk a little bit about culture which is one of my favorite things um how do you build relationships uh that's for josh king uh how do you build relationships with people on your team when you are remote like this um is it do you like book time or or what's your what's your secret sarah i'm not sure i've got this one dialed down right because i have a team who are based in scotland switzerland australia canada east coast of america and west coast right so those time zones do not overlap in any shape or form um often so um yeah my colleague and i in switzerland thomas miller actually do have a one-to-one every week now that's really easy for us because there's only a one-hour difference so it's super easy to schedule and um thomas and i have been having those chats and we actually had our chat today um and we spent half an hour talking about ubiquity network equipment and philips hue lights so we didn't even speak about work if i'm honest so those kind of relationships are great um and i've got to the stage where i i don't even put on like my makeup i don't do my hair i don't put on my contact lenses because i'm that comfortable with thomas now which sounds really weird but um you know we we are in that total um teammate zone and i think you need to have those kind of times um with your teammates that are remote who don't live in the same you know um house as you nowadays because that's where we're all based um but i don't i i i need to make a better effort with the people who are outside of my time zone but it's and not to make excuses but it's often hard especially with say my australian colleagues because as i'm getting my breakfast in the morning they're just logging off ready to get their dinner and and do things like that so you really do have to make a conscious effort and i think we all need to get better at that in this world and especially since there are cultural differences um we were speaking actually just before and this live stream about some of the cultural differences and some of the ways even just i've been doing a lot of gardening um which is you know tending to my backyard for people who don't talk the lingo and and things like that those those things make a difference in having to translate some words um into different phrases and understand that and you know you have to build that you have to work on that you have to understand that certain people love to see things visually some people only want to interact via email that's just the way they want to work some people want to have those face-to-face calls every week and you have to have those face-to-face calls and everybody watch differently and i think we all need to make a massive effort to work with a team in this remote and i yeah i'm not great at it but i try my best when i when i can i i think it's probably a lot like your calendar where being deliberate goes a long way uh and again i i find that being intentional and just saying hey this is what i'm trying to do makes it a lot easier to have those conversations um because i know a lot of us in this current environment didn't ever plan to work remotely um and it's interesting because we didn't broadly build up those skills and so it's always interesting to talk to people who have been practicing to a degree you know i have friends who work remote all the time and they have tips and you know when the rest of us were trolling you know scrambling to get webcams and you know move our stuff from our offices it's like oh well welcome to my world um so i think it's interesting that there's a whole aspect of being deliberate that that goes a long way um yeah so in your presentation you mentioned working for a whiskey company and i gotta ask like how what i mean that's one of those you know some people's dream job and hopefully watching the stream how was that i mean other than the barn that was really chilly which probably saved on cooling how would how was that i mean how did you leave that um that was a cool company to work for um one of the the perks for working for a whiskey company here in scotland is um you sometimes get an allocation of um alcohol so every quarter you would get to go and pick so many bottles um of of the produce and get to do that so that was fun that was an experiment i joined the company not liking whiskey left the company addicted to whiskey um so yeah that was fun and getting to see how it was made and getting to hear some of the stories because that's that's a great thing as well as i.t because it takes you outside of your department you know i get to interact with the people who you know are in the canteen in the restaurant the people who are hr the people who make the whiskey even the person that owns the company i had to deal with him um on occasion so you get the chance to build up relationships outside of the it department and and just learn a bit about that so the whiskey company was good fun um unfortunately i left because there was no role my career i you know there was no role above me to to move into nobody else was moving on they weren't expanding so in order to further my career i had to leave unfortunately so um but yeah it was good fun i i i do miss some of the perks of working for a whiskey company that's awesome we don't have any whiskey companies in washington that i know of quite yet so i'll have to hold my hopes out for that i've got two i got two right down the road three actually i'm sorry three yeah yeah left 45 minutes from the jack daniels distillery okay come live near james [Laughter] tempting let's stay on the west coast though so i think yeah okay so i think it's interesting throughout your whole thing it's like be deliberate if i was going to cliff notes for the for the people i'm going to talk to in the future be deliberate reach out be genuine uh and and throughout the whole thing it's like you've definitely acknowledged that you need to keep moving your career up and recognizing when you hit um a barrier or a ceiling probably not the best word but um and i think that's that's awesome and commendable um all of us should take cliff notes on that um is there anything else that you want to share because again i want to be conscientious of everybody's time and how that goes um one thing i probably haven't didn't talk about in the presentation was um try thing new things so for a while i am tilt to say was like i'm not going to start a youtube channel i'm going to start a youtube channel i'm not going to start youtube no one's going to watch that what am i going to talk about finally did it and i've been doing that now for 60 weeks so i do a weekly blog every friday talking about the azure news and i talk about what i'm doing and just share some of this the stuff and the nonsense that i talk about every week and i've been doing that for 60 weeks now solid so every week i've had a video and although i'm not hitting you know the kardashians type viewing figures or whatever maybe um i've got a steady following and it's actually helped me do things like this talking to the camera it helped me build up that skill it helped teach me about audio that's why i've got this rode microphone to try and help improve the audio that's why i've got these audio panels these aren't just art panels these are audio panels so they help them dampen the sound they also look great in the background so it taught me tons um that i didn't think i needed to know or wasn't important and to be honest i wish i'd started it before that i did i finally did so don't be afraid to try these new things don't be afraid to go and write a blog post don't be afraid to go and create a youtube video you don't have to be on camera you know it could be a screencast and you're just sharing how to do things just try these things because you never know what you're going to learn from it you never know what opportunities are going to come from and you never know how you're going to surprise yourself and how you actually do these things so um don't be frightened because the majority of the community are massively supportive and that's what i've always found and yeah just go out and try it there's you know fail feel fast as they say fail that try again and i i love subscribing to your youtube videos they're great and you know like my travelogue of scotland plus azure so two things that i'm fairly interested in so thanks for that um when did you so you've done it for 60 weeks and i i i saw the video where you did your yay when did you feel that it became a successful habit because that's another thing that folks are curious about like well if i start a habit flossing my teeth or doing a youtube video uh when do you feel that it it crosses that threshold from something that you're working actively on to being just oh yeah i'm today's today's youtube day or maybe some weeks are harder some weeks it's definitely i have to force myself to keep up that cadence and that habit other weeks i'm super excited and i can't wait to do my video and you'll probably see some of the videos but i'm really talking really fast i'm really excited about stuff um and those are the weeks that i i enjoy and keep me motivated yes there's always going to be weeks where you you you might struggle with it like like flossing your teeth right we probably all don't do that enough as our dentists all tell us um but um yeah i think if you have a passion for these kind of things that will come naturally and even in the weeks i struggle i still do it because i still love seeing the reaction from the people and it sounds very it sounds very like weird that i like seeing people like it or comment or share it and you know that doesn't drive me obviously but it's nice to see and it keeps me motivated and it keeps reminding me to keep doing it and not stop um if that's what i'm saying to say it's nice to see so yeah like i said the community are amazing and supporting these kind of things so i always remember the nice people that are nice to me and i reciprocate that to other people as well and encourage new people that start new channels and stuff like that so yeah if the world goes round in good karma that's why i think we'll keep that in mind uh so another question i have um how many individual places did you were you employed at before you landed at microsoft and even at microsoft you've had two or three positions two at microsoft do a i don't know i'm gonna have to like pulled up my linkedin profile or something to like figure out this one john check my linkedin don't ask questions on stream well like because it's a few because it's definitely not as little as i maybe talked about on um because like you said it sounds like a linear journey that all just went very smoothly and very nicely didn't that's you know that's not quite how it worked never worked um there's definitely a few jobs in between that i probably regret choosing because i chose for the wrong reasons um but let's let's let's see how many jobs i actually had now do you want companies or do you want jobs with even within well i mean i think that's another important point is that like and perhaps perhaps too granular you know it's like one of those bi dashboards the pivot table pops open you're like whoa i did not expect that amount of information but for example is like i'll talk to people in the community and they've been at their current employer for i don't know 10 15 years but they've gone through a number of role changes and folks will get hung up um when i talk to them about well i've been at my current company for x number of years i'm like well you haven't been doing the same thing i think i think both are valid because you could switch companies because you want to reinvent yourself or or take a different whole career path like coding uh you know and infrastructure as code which double thumbs up um position changes do you think helped you along your career um so i've just counted on my linkedin so i had eight different companies and it rolls um before i got to microsoft and there was a lot of job changes in between there because some of the companies i was there for you know five or six years and changed roles and got promotions and stuff like that um thinking about it actually my career probably has been quite linear in the sense of what i was talking about in the presentation you know i started off doing those first level help desk roles i moved up to second level third level and consultancy and then for probably the five six years i've been at that consultant level um or architect level so i'm a big believer in doing that kind of apprenticeship within the it department i i see some people come straight out of university and go into an architecture role and start to design massive systems and they don't understand you know how a naming convention really works in the real world or how some of these solutions actually work and how they interact with the end users so um i'm a big believer and people have to kind of start at the bottom unfortunately and go through all the pain that you need to go through so i think all my job roles taught me something whether that be about technology and enhance my skills or about how to not actually pick a job and how to change a job because like i said i've changed roles sometimes chasing the money and that wasn't the right thing to do so um there's definitely every job has probably taught me something um either about myself technology or about the whole changing job process that you should really actually go through in your life so yeah um yeah i don't i don't regret any of my job choices to be honest but yeah like i say some of them i know i've checked i've thinking back i've chosen them wrong and so but but that's that's life isn't it it's about making mistakes and learning from them and not um letting them get you down that is a very fair and articulated response so i appreciate that because again excuse me it's important for people to understand that nothing is linear and that it takes dedication and a little bit of well a lot of it being deliberate uh to make career moves and career changes and i think it's important for people to both internally and externally in the communities to understand that that journey is is normal um i i think it's great in your example how you started at the help desk and worked your way up because i think that's an experience that a lot of people have um i don't know how consistent it is with young folks younger than present company um because i don't know we often joke i feel that we want a junior sysadmin with five years experience well those two things like no it's not how it it rolls it should be a junior system with do you know how to install linux from an iso do you know what an iso is don't forget the master's degree yeah exactly that's obviously that's what it requires um so i think you know part of the thing that that i find in a lot of roles is that you have to inform people in hiring and what have you that the folks that you have internally they're there because they're already to a degree a cultural fit which means if they're still willing to learn you've already solved the hairier and woolier part of a person being hired i do hiring so i think about this stuff a lot um but i think it's important for that to be communicated that yes it's it is semi-linear it's good to know the company it's good to know your motivations even you meant to it's like sometimes i chased a job for money and that maybe wasn't the right thing um and i think that's those are all factors that need to be talked about because you know usually it's like well i want to go work for a big giant multinational corporation because they have a really good medical plan and maybe the job isn't what you know fills my bucket uh bucket filling is very important um so i think that's that's really good so thanks for for sharing that yeah well like oh all right well sarah we definitely appreciate you taking the time that time out of your day you said six o'clock or seven seven o'clock now probably seven pm yeah yeah uh over there so we appreciate you uh taking the time to talk to us a little bit so this recording will be posted on youtube uh in a couple days uh but just kind of give everyone a heads up but some of our uh our next [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: PowerShell.org

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Length: 71min 9sec (4269 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020