#7- Kevin Mack – the “welldocumented” nerd
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In this episode we talk with Kevin Mack who works as a Cloud Solution Architect with ISVs.
He talks about how his past life as a professor gave him valuable life and tech skills, like explaining and simplify for the audience & also helped him sharpen his debugging skills. We also talk about how his wife made the greatest contribution to his blog, and also helps him run the alpha/beta test before delivering a session on a complex topic. We also talk about how designing for high availability is critical for the customers that he works with and he goes about designing them.
Kevin’s journey on how he got to where he is today (02:08)
Went to school business information technology and how he wanted to be anything but a programmer – but that’s where life got him 🙂
He started off as a software developer, and how he took the process of reconciling bar exams from few days to a couple of hours.
What drew him to the cloud was how it helped him to do things and create more impact in an easy and fast way
His first cloud solution – Early learning solution for parents
He now works as with Independent Software Vendors (ISV) in the State and Local Government spaceInteresting projects that Kevin has worked on (06:03)
Project #1 – Business problem – Achieve massive data processing in a really quick way – 100s of TB data on premise. He also talks about how he optimized the solution, making it compute & cost effective using Azure technologies. He had the opportunity to work on latest technologies like Lucene, Casandra.
Project #2 – Biggest impact for ISV solutions that he works on is high availability – a downtime of single service or a server means all their customers are affected. How composite SLAs are more important than SLAs for each service. He also talks about how monitoring is critical – when we layer in services like Kubernetes and microservices.Kevin’s advice to anyone who is starting off in the Cloud Solution space (14:44)
Kevin talks about how his past life as a professor for the course “Intro to web development”, taught him all he needs to know about debugging, about how to boil down complex tech concepts and explain it in a way that makes sense. This skill of “simplification” really helps a Cloud Solution Architect in the following ways
Help build rapport and make the customer comfortable to ask questions
Empowers the Cloud Solution Architect to give and relay information and most importantly empower you to not know information.
“The first time we are absolutely in our right to not know the answer, but the second time we are not.” – Advice he got when he started off in Microsoft
He runs through his chalk talk with his wife who doesn’t have a tech background and uses it as an alpha/beta test before delivering it to the real audience – the principle being if someone who is non-tech can get it, anyone can get it
Explain and simplify the complex – is what he feels is the biggest strength anyone can possess
Anyone can gain this skill – there are enough community colleges which need professor. But if you can’t be a professor, find a user/meetup group – pick a topic to deliver which will force yourself to learn it.Kevin’s advice to keep himself abreast of all the changes happening in the cloud world (22:50)
When he wants to learn anything new, and to conquer competing priorities – he sets a timeline by which he will write a blog post about a new technology that will force him to learn and deliver on the topic.
He picks on trends from the customer he is working with and learns about them.
How yours truly, uses Kevin’s blog series “weekly series” to keep up with all the latest technologies.How to get in touch with Kevin
LinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-mack-4834ba17/
Twitter – https://twitter.com/DocumentedNerd
Website – http://www.welldocumentednerd.com/
“We all have limited keystrokes in our lives, use them wisely. Emails are where keystrokes go to die” – Scott Hanselman. Show Notes Available at https://cloud-monk.com/2019/11/11/ep7/.