Throughout my career as a software developer, I've generally been part of the Information Technology organization whenever I worked inside a big corporation. In startups and incubators, I've worked very closely (if not actually wearing the hat) with the folks designing the infrastructure for my projects. I've always felt that this knowledge helped me design better applications (and troubleshoot more efficiently), because I understood the capabilities and limitations of the underlying platform in complete detail. Yesterday, I officially hung up my Developer six-shooters, becoming the IT-only Director of Technology at MLS PIN.
I couldn't even say where my interest with IT started. First, my parents provided a lot of computer access to me as a child: There was an Apple in my house as far back as I can remember, a Coleco Adam, a PCjr, two IBM-PC clones, and a Micron Pentium MMX @ 200Mhz. We were also early adopters to the interweb, having had modem/BBS access since the early 80s and Compuserv, Prodigy, and eventually Quantum Computer Service's America Online. I've used MS-DOS back to 3.3, Windows back to 3.0, and even GeoWorks' Ensemble.
Then there was Autodesk (née Softdesk). During the summer of 1995, a temporary position on their Technical Support desk turned into a career. I developed a great rapport with the IT staff at Softdesk, particularly Mike Safford, the IT Manager. With his direct mentoring, I learned all about TCP/IP, switch infrastructures, Windows domains, and how all the crazy "entire globe" stuff worked. He even cajoled me into running a RedHat 4.1 box, thereby learnin' me some csh and Samba along the way. Within the Tech Support organization, I quickly became the web guy, publishing our FAQs and whitepapers at a time when few companies even had a web site. Enter programming. Beset by programmers on all sides and monkeying with the API of our Scopus ticketing system, I got my first taste of "real" development and I was hooked.
Then there were the dot-com years and, honestly, it's all a blur at this point... I probably contributed to the launch of 20-30 websites in the span of two years, including some Fortune 100 and VC startups that never made it. I got really hands-on with the system guys during those years, because we had to plan for "real" business to happen on those sites, not just static stuff. For those playing Six Degrees, I configured Blogger's first standalone server and MetaFilter's first server (both helping Matt Haughey, who was a good eFriend at the time).
The rest was mostly corporate-y stuff and by that point I had my chops, a few MS certs, and knew more than the average bear about configuring Windows systems for serious web hosting.
So....
All along, I was there "dabbling" in IT... but, of course, it was never what I was hired to do: I was a webslinger who happened to know hardware stuff. It didn't matter that I had an interest, because (at the time) it was a means serving an end... I always had to go do my "real" job.
Now it is my real job, and I'm really enjoying IT.
Check out my video interview with Windows IT Pro. I was almost giddy explaining what we've done with our infrastructure.
Stay tuned for more IT posts to follow.