What Have I Been Up To?

I haven’t posted here in quite some time.
Where have I been?

Summary

At my day job, working at a major tech Vendor, I have been splitting my time between two main areas.

1. Consulting with customers on highly technical Email Security Product Configurations.
2. Building out, maintaining, and migrating an org-wide internal ChatOps Chat Bot.

At home, I’ve been staying away from all things technical to maintain my brain health for work. Instead, I have been front-loading my hobby time into:

1. Maintaining a house (Yard Work).
2. Raising kids (Conflict Resolution).
3. Building a YouTube Channel.
4. Video Editing.

I figure that the YouTube channel skills will help with my customer communications and relationships, by virtue of upskilling my presentation and communication skills.
Is it working? I think so.

Email Security Product Configurations

What’s interesting about it…
One thing I’ve noticed over the years working at a major Vendor is that different industries have wildly different security postures but one thing remains the same: Everyone struggles to maintain Best Practices!

Since I work at a Vendor, I live inside Official Product Documentation and Product Administration Guides. These are my lifeblood. These documents, for various reasons, always recommend specific baselines for product set up. This can span from internal recipient validation mechanisms to external DMARC policy settings.

I can not count how many times I run across settings and policies that are below the Best Practices recommendations. This is of no fault of the admin of the product.
Everything is just very complicated now.

Do you remember when Yahoo! and Google flipped to their DMARC-Required and Mass-Mailer policies last year? Hardly anyone had DMARC set up so everyone scrambled to stand it up. Now there are millions of p=none policies out there, where before there was simply no DMARC policy at all. It’s quite shocking. It’s not the only example.

ChatOps Chat Bot

What’s interesting about it…
Working in a mega-corp is interesting. Different internal units use different implementations of this and that, Salesforce here and ServiceNow there, this team uses it this way and this other team uses it that way, and so on.
ChatOps bots hook into services with API calls.
When a system like SalesForce is torn down and migrated to something else, the ChatOps bot’s API calls must change to suite the new system. One time, this bot had to read JSON. Then it had to make SQL Queries. Then it switched to something else and had to leverage a chain of micro-services for authentication purposes. You know, the access-token-flipping, but flipping one token into another, into another, to get the actual token you need.
This makes for many complaints.
Here’s what I’ve learned:
If you complain inside your head, and figure out the solution with your hands, you will get raises! Because it is valuable!

Building a YouTube Channel

What’s interesting about it…
I make these videos to try to scam the algorithm, find new and inventive ways to steal popular videos keywords, study analytics to exploit viewer attention spans, and so on.
But the biggest lesson learned so far is GET INSIDE THE VIEWER’S HEAD. Figure out what is so valuable to them about this service you provide, and do that more.
For example, at my YouTube channel, the viewers don’t care about humor, how smart I am, any of that. They want tips on the topic. That’s what blows up. So that’s what I’m giving them more of. This easily expands into my daily work life and seems to be a key tenant of being an effective consultant.

Video Editing

What’s interesting about it…
I am a talker. Look at this blog. It does not take a genius to realize that I just open a Notepad and start winging it. I take this approach in my YouTube videos as well. Because I am a talker, I never learned to rely on read-along scripts. I’ve always been able to just wing-it and do very well. However, those of us who wing it tend to think and present on-the-fly. This leads to stilted speech! It is very obvious while editing video of myself speaking that I say five words, pause, thing about the next, then say the rest of the sentence.
I have been horrified to realize that this is how my virtual meetings go. I simply do not think out every single sentence before uttering them. I utter the first half, then the last half.
What have I learned here?
If it is important, think out the entire sequence before saying it. Because then the pauses can be intentional and purposeful. Because we rely on pauses to understand emphasis. Because what is being said is IMPORTANT!

Thank you for attending my TED talk, I will try to write something up on how to complain effectively within massive professional organizations.