So why "Old Dogs and New Tricks"

An Old Dog from Creative Commons

I worked my way up in IT rather quickly, thanks in large part to a great mentor. After about seven years in the field I landed a lucrative job at a comfortable, safe, stagnant shop. It worked out great for me because I had very young kids and a powerful need to enjoy their preschool years as much as possible. That safe job let me spend more time with my kids than most dads get to enjoy.

But that time at the comfortable, stable, IT shop came with a price I would pay years later.

Managing user roles, updating the same software over and over again, fielding routine problem tickets,  and doing more administrative task than technical work rusted everything in my tool box. One day when a manager said they were going to go in a different direction with my position I was confronted with the near death sentence in IT....

My Skill set was almost 6 years out of date.

For example: On my first interview I was asked what I knew about Oracle Virtualization.

Well I had set up quite a few zones on Solaris 8, in 2007. I knew the principles and most of the commands pretty well. So I asked, perhaps meekly, "Are you talking about zones"?

Interview over! Don't call us we'll call you!

It took a month of day and night study to catch up on some basic technologies so I could get a foothold somewhere else at a senior level. During that season I rediscovered why I went into IT rather than VLSI design. I enjoy tinkering and playing with computers. Lately I have also discovered that I like blogging.

So I decided to do an old school "This was my week" blog. As I learn new tricks I will talk about them and how I learned. Once I master a skill I will find something else to play with. I used to treat computers like a Lego set, and it's time I get back to that.

How will I decide what to learn?

Well Monster is a great source of information, perhaps more useful than journals. One needs simply to look at jobs in their field that they would like to have, pick something they don't know, and start learning.

I will also take advantage of the exceptional amount of free learning which can be found online. While *I* know that regular old bash can do anything you should need there are people, people who hire other people, who believe that things like Python and Ruby are important.

Finally I hope maybe some other old dogs, or young pups, will howl a suggest or two my way.