My Talk at SCaLE 12x

I originally meant to sign up to help with the kid’s stuff at SCaLE 12x. If you have no other reason to go, go for game night – good times. However, on the kids email list, there was a call out for more volunteers for the beginner talks. Heck, I could do that! Right?

Yes, of course, but I drastically underestimated the effort involved in putting together a talk and my amazing efforts as procrastination. The night before, I’m up late trying to review every example for accuracy (and I failed). The day of, I got to check in at a different line (uptown!) and I got to camp out in a different room than all of the riff-raff. 🙂 Mostly, I was happy to give a little bit back to the community that has helped me so much.

I was very nervous, not for the talk or the public speaking, but for the nit-picking. I gave the talk and it went ok. I did get one criticism that if I’m going to copy and paste commands into a slide show, I should at least run them first. I spent the night before trying to test every command, but I did miss a couple. In addition, the source of the commands was mostly from my history files.

Overall, it seems like it was helpful to a few people. The bombastic title, “Magical SysAdmin Incantations for New Freedom Fighters“, helped fill the room too.

I will see if SCaLE would like me to re-present the talk next year. If so, what I will do different is:
– Make the slide more visually exciting. Sorry Libre Office, you’re not cutting it.
– Make sure I don’t sound like a robot. I was too mono-tone. Make it sizzle.
– Add more stories. Take each of the commands and lead the audience through a story they can relate to. This will make the talk fun, interesting and memorable.
– Do a better job with the book give away. If I lock down the commands better, it goes to the first person to find a typo.
– Be done 4 weeks ahead. Proof check one more time 1-2 weeks ahead.

At this year’s SCaLE, Docker and CoreOS were all the rage (with good reason). I intend to follow up on them big time. I got distracted reading up on Docker. There’s not much in the way of docs, so I started reading the code. It’s written in “go.” I’ve never seen it before, but I like what I see so far.

My other follow up is to dive a bit into Ktap. I’m hoping by SCaLE 13x, I’ll be able to write a better and more technical talk on a new technology.

Go to SCaLE. Good times, great people, brilliant tech and completely geeky.

George Robinson has been taming technology since 1981. His first bitter taste of UNIX was in 1987 with Xenix 2.1.1. George's youth was spent in building electronics and writing programs to post on the local BBS. In high school, he became involved in student radio and was hired by the top station in the market. After high school, he spent two years traveling the western United States and Canada with REACH Youth Ministries. George double majored in Psychology and Music Theory at Rocky Mountain College in Billings, Montana. During college, the Internet wave hit Montana and his hobby became highly in-demand skills. George finally went pro in 1998 and has been trying to automate himself out of a job ever since. He rode the Internet boom to Orange county. Making the most of his diverse experience, he pursues a career in systems administration and DevOps. He has had roles in numerous startups and has been a systems administrator in enterprises like Verizon Wireless, Yahoo, Nestlé & Fico.