Steve SumichrastThe Information Technology field is quite a unique space to plant roots for a career. Very few fields have such open sharing of ideas, projects and aspirations as this field. I have been quite fortunate to have entered into the IT space just as the Internet and online services were really becoming A Thing™. I have always been amazed by just how eager fellow colleagues and peers are to share their ideas, scripts, projects, goals and accomplishments through both in person (conferences, work, over dinner) and through electronic mediums (blogs, forum posts, Slack channels). Up until the beginning of this year I have been an in-office employee, which has afforded me the opportunity to share my knowledge and help empower others, just like those that helped me when I started out in this industry (thank you Russ). I have always felt a great sense of satisfaction and pride when I can convey a topic to a colleague and recognize the light bulb go off. However at the beginning of this year I embarked on a new opportunity, affording me the ability to work from my home office almost 100% of the time. While this has granted me great changes in my work/life balance, it has to some degree removed my ability to share knowledge and exchange thoughts and ideas with others in my field.
Enter this sumistev.com.
For years I have talked about starting a blog to share PowerShell snippets, design ideas, issues and resolutions to technical things I administer, personal interests and hobbies. Perhaps others have experienced this, but the hardest part of beginning to document and blog has not been the content creation; rather it has been the tasks of picking and setting up a CMS and picking a domain name. Being a very much backoffice IT person typically lends to a lack of creativity, and it is this very thing that has kept me from creating a true online presence where I can share my thoughts and ideas. I have finally come to terms with this fact: I do not have a creative bone in my body. But letting this character flaw stop me from sharing knowledge, which has brought so much satisfaction personally and professionally, was unacceptable — and so, here we are!
I have all sorts of ideas on topics I want to contribute here. First and foremost, my background in IT is virtualization, compute and storage — and I expect a significant quantity of my posts will be on these topics. I also find enjoyment with online multiplayer games, various scripting languages (primarily PowerShell) and home automation — so I suspect I will have times where these areas of interest will also come to the foreground.
In 1998, while entering the 7th grade, a planetarium director for our school corporation’s planetarium accepted me into the planetarium club (past the acceptance date, which he has only done a handful of times ever). That decision charted the course for my life into Information Technology. I will be forever grateful to him for this decision, and I easily attribute my success, professionally and personally, to his mentoring. One of the greatest things he ever impressed on us was not letting perfection become the enemy of the good. It is with this thought in mind that I decided to stop letting my inability to come up with some creative and catchy blog name (such as William Lam’s virtuallyGhetto blog) get in my way of mentoring, sharing and helping our industry become a better place. I am excited to have finally established some place to start sharing things I have created and learned, and I hope others will find it to be valuable as well.
Thanks for stopping by — and I look forward to future interactions!
