In a previous post I mentioned how I am using Buffer, Feedly, and Zapier to automate parts of my online persona. In this post I will talk about how I found a workflow that wasn’t support by Zapier, and how I used the API from Buffer and Azure Functions to automate post generation.
Continue reading “Using Azure Functions and Buffer API for Automation”
This is about building my personal brand. If you don’t care about any of that, then you can safely skip this post. If you’re looking for ways to automate your brand building, then this will probably resonate with you. There was a period of time when I thought that marketing myself and having a personal brand was kind of gross. Now I realize that personal branding is pretty important if you want to build a career in the public side of IT. I am not making the argument that the only way to progress in your IT career is by being active on social media, community meetups, and actively blogging. But for a certain type of career path, the one that I seem to be on, those things definitely help.
Continue reading “Automating my Life with Feedly, Zapier, and Buffer”
At Cloud Field Day 3 we visited the Veritas office and they presented their cloud vision to us. It took a little while to ramp up, as I detailed in my post here. My fellow CFD delegate Martez Reed has already put an excellent post together detailing the high-level view of what Veritas had on display, so I won’t rehash that now. Instead, I would like to focus down on their CloudPoint offering and actually try and take it for a spin. Let’s see how far I get.
Last week I participated in Cloud Field Day 3. If you’re not familiar with Cloud Field Day, then I would highly recommend checking out the post from my fellow delegate Nick Janetakis detailing his experience. It’s a thorough and well thought-out post describing what Cloud Field Day is, and why you might be interested.
As I watched each vendor present, I kept coming back to the same set of questions. The focus of this post is one of those. How can companies use the cloud to innovate their current product portfolio? There was a stark difference between those organizations that had embraced the cloud as an enabler of new solutions and those who had instead approached cloud like a check box on a list of things organizations should be doing. Broadly, I think the innovative companies – or the innovative branch of the company – fell into three broad categories.
Continue reading “Innovate or Die? Three Ways to Cloud Enablement”
Before I even knew there was a term, I thought I was an impostor. Not in tech mind you, but in life. I was 11 years old. Over the summer I had visited my first Head Shop, ushered in by my older and ostensibly wiser cousin. I didn’t know what a bong was, or what all these dancing bears were about. The whole place stank of some unknown odor, which I would later be able to identify as a mélange of patchouli, sandalwood, and pot. Mostly pot. What I could dimly sense – as a budding, rebellious teenager – was that this place was cool, and I wanted to be cool. My cousin explained that the dancing bear was in fact a totem of The Grateful Dead, and I vaguely recognized the name from MTV. That would, of course, be the Touch of Grey single that served as an introduction of The Dead to many of my peer group.