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.”
Struggling to Write Custom Plugins? How AI Can Bridge the Gap
In this session, I’ll share how I use AI to bridge that skills gap and rapidly build reliable custom Nagios plugins without deep programming expertise. I’ll walk through a practical workflow: defining monitoring requirements, generating initial scripts, iteratively refining logic, validating results, and preparing a plugin for production.
I’ll also discuss the guardrails I rely on—how to verify accuracy, avoid unsafe or incomplete code, and ensure long-term maintainability when working with AI-generated scripts. Attendees will see real examples of plugins I’ve created using this process, along with a repeatable workflow, practical tips, and the confidence to create and maintain their own custom plugins—without needing a full development team.
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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