J.R.R. Tolkien was a master of presenting real world situations in fantastical settings and making them both understandable and solvable. For many of us, Tolkien gave us the tools and the courage to conquer both the imagined fears and all-too-real obstacles standing in our way during childhood and adolescence.
BUT... If we take the time to really listen, Tolkien's Legendarium contains relevant and compelling lessons for seasoned I.T. practitioners. Seen in the right light (not just the setting sun of Durin's Day) we can find models for handling all types of technical challenges.
In this talk, I'll speak of far-sighted elves, underestimated hobbits, mysterious wizards, and of course of rings (Tolkien rather than token). But in the process I'll share a dragon's hoard of insights for the problems we find in our middleware, rather than Middle Earth.
A full speaker profile is available on adatosystems.com
In my sordid career, I have been an actor, bug exterminator and wild-animal remover (nothing crazy like pumas or wildebeests. Just skunks, snakes, and raccoons.), electrician, carpenter, stage-combat instructor, ASL interpreter, and Sunday school teacher. Oh, yeah, I've also worked with computers.
While my first keyboard was an IBM selectric, and my first digital experience was on an Atari 400, my professional work in tech started in 1989 (when you got Windows 286 for free on twelve 5¼” when you bought Excel 1.0). Since then I've worked as a classroom instructor, courseware designer, helpdesk operator, desktop support staff, sysadmin, network engineer, and software distribution technician.
Then, about 25 years ago, I got involved with monitoring. I've worked with a wide range of tools: Tivoli, BMC, OpenView, janky perl scripts, Nagios, SolarWinds, DOS batch files, Zabbix, Grafana, New Relic, and other assorted nightmare fuel. I've designed solutions for companies that were modest (~10 systems), significant (5,000 systems), and ludicrous (250,000 systems). In that time, I've learned a lot about monitoring and observability in all it's many and splendid forms.
