On the 22nd of October, I presented at the annual conference of my beloved NLNOG, the community of Dutch network operators. NLNOG is a national treasure, an international treasure even, since we do everything in English.

NLNOG holds several events every year, where we entertain and educate each other with talks on new and old technologies. We also have food and drink afterwards, sometimes even several drinks.

It is a true community, with many of us anxiously looking forward to our next meetup. Not only do we talk technology, most meetings additionally have talks on more human things. We care about each other.

For example Erik Bais, who we still miss intensely, changed many people’s (working) lives with his 2019 talk on Working in a toxic environment. Meanwhile, Bart de Bruijn in 2023 opened many of our eyes with his talk on Autism and working in IT. This year Teun Vink presented on our digital legacies, and how deal with them if we or someone is no longer there.

Combined with a super strong technical portfolio of presentations, this makes the typical NLNOG event something you can’t miss.

The team behind NLNOG makes it all appear easy, which is the best way to tell they are doing a tremendous job. So thank you NLNOG board and thank you NLNOG community for being what you are!

Life Long Learning: Dealing with New Things

This time round, I presented the fourth part of my NLNOG trilogy on work. Earlier installments featured the polarization between technical people and management, how to improve your career monterarily and spritually, and finally if you should even have a job or if you perhaps should/must become a contractor or an entrepreneur.

video

Last week, the subject was a small but important part of your (eventually) decades long career: dealing with new technologies and change in general.

We are flooded within new things, and many of them are not all that good.

New technologies could be hype, they could be nonsense, but they could also be genuinely useful.

If you follow “the new shiny” too enthusiastically you’ll never truly master any technology. You might even end up in management! Meanwhile, many of us at some point check out of whatever the new hotness is this week, and choose to stick with known good technologies. And eventually this makes you an expert in stuff that no one wants anymore.

In this talk, I hope to offer guidance on how to evaluate new technologies, possibly together with your community, as this spreads the work. And I also urge everyone to study their own feelings: why do I (dis)like this technology so much? Am I in love or am I properly studying if things are good or not? Making the right choices here can, over many years, alter your career in decisive ways.

Finally, the talk goes a bit beyond technology, where I urge everyone to take the opportunity to do something Completely Different from time to time. Working in customer support for a while for example is guaranteed to make you better at ALL the technical things you do, simply because you now have a better mental model of what people DO with your stuff.

Slides can be found here, and the video is here.