About The Speaker
Surviving IT: My career has been peppered with long roles, and short contracts. I’ve always enjoyed IT because, save for support roles, I typically don’t have contact with people outside the organization, which is something I was deathly afraid of. In 2019, I started a new job at a great company full of wonderful people. Two weeks later, my wife left me. Having spent nearly 20 years in IT (and a hell of a lot more than that working with computers at home), it struck me that maybe continuing to do what I’ve been most comfortable doing isn’t actually what I should be doing. So when Josh Manley came and asked me to be the sole technical sales engineer at Nagios, to be on the phone and interacting specifically with people who are not part of the company, I said, “Sure.”
The Power of Knowing Stuff
As a Technical Sales Engineer at Nagios Enterprises, I’ve had the pleasure of talking to many IT professionals about a myriad of different technical hurdles that need to be overcome for monitoring purposes. For example, have you ever heard of a data diode? Until a couple of years ago, I hadn’t. But I know how stuff works, so I was successfully able to understand the monitoring challenges faced and how to overcome them with Nagios XI. Come hear about some strange scenarios I’ve run into over the years and how we were able to brainstorm around them.
Behind the Session Title
Lessons Learned, Lessons Applied: Stories from my past, and how I’ve applied them later in life, often during technical demos. Turns out, working as a jack-of-all-trades kind of role in IT will let you speak somewhat intelligently to a wide range of audiences. Some stories are about taking what I know, and expanding on that knowledge on the fly, during a demo. Some are just stories I like to share because I’d like to see change in how IT is handled.
What I Hope You Learn
Why Attend: Come to hear stories about personal growth and building trust on calls with prospective clients, stay for the dad jokes and hot takes about IT.
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