Crossing the Threshold
Published on 16 Apr 2014 · Filed in Musing · 507 words (estimated 3 minutes to read)Last week while attending the CloudStack Collaboration Conference in my home city of Denver, I had a bit of a realization. I wanted to share it here in the hopes that it might serve as an encouragement for others out there.
Long-time readers know that one of my projects over the last couple of years has been to become more fluent in Linux (refer back to my 2012 project list and my 2013 project list). I gave myself a B+ for my efforts last year, feeling that I had made good progress over the course of the year. Even so, I still felt like there was still so much that I needed to learn. As so many of us are inclined to do, I was more focused on what I still hadn’t learned instead of taking a look at what I had learned.
This is where last week comes in. Before the conference started, I participated in a couple of “mini boot camps” focused on CloudStack and related tools/clients/libraries. (You may have seen some of my tweets about tools like cloudmonkey, Apache libcloud, and awscli/ec2stack.) As I worked through the boot camps, I could hear the questions that other attendees were asking as well as the tasks with which others were struggling. Folks were wrestling with what I thought were pretty simple tasks; these were not, after all, very complex exercises. So the lab guide wasn’t complete or correct; you should be able to figure it out, right?
Then it hit me. I’m a Linux guy now.
That’s right—I had crossed the threshold between “working on being a Linux guy” and “being a Linux guy.” It’s not that I know everything there is to know (far from it!), but that the base level of knowledge had finally accrued to a level where—upon closer inspection—I realized that I was fluent enough that I could perform most common tasks without a great deal of effort. I knew enough to know what to do when something didn’t work, or wasn’t configured properly, and the general direction in which to look when trying to determine exactly what was going on.
At this point you might be wondering, “What does that have to do with encouraging me?” That’s a fair question.
As IT professionals—especially those on the individual contributor (IC) track instead of the management track—we are tasked with having to constantly learn new products, new technologies, and new methodologies. Because the learning never stops (and that isn’t a bad thing, in my humble opinion), we tend to focus on what we haven’t mastered. We forget to look at what we have learned, at the progress that we have made. Maybe, like me, you’re on a journey of learning and education to move from being a specialist in one type of technology to a practitioner of another type. If that’s the case, perhaps it’s time you stop saying “I will be a <new technology> person” and say “I am a <new technology> person.” Perhaps it’s time for you to cross the threshold.