I have just completed my first week as a Senior Consultant at Red Hat, and I’d like to what I’ve learnt about working for a company with an ‘open-source business model’. This post intends to share something I found interesting and not to market a company or employer. InterLock-Down My first week at Red Hat aligned with an internal event called ‘InterLock’, or for 2020 ‘InterLock Down’; this event allowed me to learn about the Red Hat ANZ business and people involved.

Building use cases to learn new products allows for new knowledge to be applied and persist much longer. Learning new topics and maintaining that knowledge is a skill. By dedicating time to understanding a range to topics, you start to understand how to learn and become more efficient. Watching videos, reading, rewriting and review are great ways to get knowledge in. But, unless you apply context and apply learning the knowledge will slip away quickly.

Eric Wright made a blog post titled: he Top 3 Skills Every IT Person Needs". It’;s an excellent article, focusing on technical skills. Skills you should be learning about to stay relevant. Eric made a number of points that I’;ve taken on board. Eric’;s post is the source of inspiration for this one. In the same spirit, I would like to address communication skills, rather than technical. Written Writing is complex, with rules which sometimes are hard to grasp.

Learning new skills is essential to stay relevant. If we are not learning new things, we are going backwards. This is not to say you should study at every moment. But, there is a need to learning something new. Different people have different methods for learning. Some people learn best from reading, others from hands on. Myself, I need hands on and a lot of notes. Becuase a learning method works for someone doesn’;t mean it will work for you.

A lot people in a recruitment position, comment on the importance of attitude when hiring a new staff member. Usually summed up as “You can train skills, not attitude”. This is also a major factor in determining a cultural fit. Attitude has a major impact on our careers, our motivation and also our health. The tricky part is that it’;s not just our attitude that affects these things, it’;s also those of who we work for and with.

There’s an old saying “Heathy body, healthy mind” and it’s something I agree with strongly. Being physically active is something I find very helpful for my work and personal life. Due to this, I would like to deviate from the technical side of things and write a post about lifestyle. When I talk about being more physically active, I’m not explicitly referring to getting fitter or achieving a fitness goal. I am simply talking about moving more, finding times during the day to move a bit.

It’s hard to work in the IT industry and not hear about automation on practically a daily basis. For quite a while I always saw automation as something for large companies that are deploying numerous servers compared to the one off file server or DC that I am used to with the clients I deal with. So happily I went along with the notion that this isn’t for me. I was wrong.

One thing I have been hearing a bit of recently is that doing a task at small scale is easier than at large scale. This simply isn’;t true, though it’;s not harder either. Both small and large scale problems have their limitations and difficulties. While not unique to SMB, budget constraints have a huge impact, spending enough to keep it running and stopping there is pretty common. Let’;s face it, pretty no matter who you work for, there is never enough money for IT.