This site’s been running for 15 years. During that time, I’ve heard from work colleagues and internet strangers about how the site’s helped them solve specific problems and shown them how to learn new technologies.
The majority of the site’s content covers virtualization, systems administration, and infrastructure. Nowadays, I’m spending less time in these areas. Virtualization and infrastructure are still incredibly interesting and definitely not solved problems, they’re just not where I’m hanging my hat these days.
Looking Back
In 2020, I saw a former employer (and my alma mater! Go Racers!) announced a data center move. Since then, the old data center space was converted to office space. This change made me reflect. I became nostalgic for the old days of racking and cabling physical servers or decommissioning older problematic physical servers through a virtualization driven consolidation project. It hit me: I haven’t interacted with data centers in years.
In 2011, I posted about changing this site’s direction. Since then, technology moved forward and the shared knowledge, tools, and culture exist to maximize or in many cases obviate the Systems Administrator. The revolution of virtualization, infrastructure software, and cloud computing providers literally changed the world.
Looking back, I got lucky! I happened to be in the right place at the right time with the right background and got a chance to ride the cloud computing wave. During that ride, one thing became clear: software powered the revolution.
New Focus: Software Engineering
Going forward, I will explore Software Engineering in three ways: actual code/products, engineer productivity, and the cultural/organizational practices enabling software engineering. Software Engineering is a collaborative effort between technology, engineers, businesses, customers, and society. Software is eating the world, and I want to try and make my own tiny dent in the seams.
Happy Hacking! -AH