I’m now in my second week at Puppet which is best known for its configuration management software that shares the same name as the company. I’m extremely excited about this new chapter in my professional life and this blog post covers some of the reasons why. Hopefully this will provide anyone reading this with helpful information as they come to an inflection point in their career. I decided to use a number of “P” words to describe what this transition is for me.

Passion

The first “P” is passion. The majority of my career has been focused on client facing consulting. Working for a software vendor is a first for me. While I am still very passionate about helping clients achieve their business objectives through the use of technology, I’m really looking forward to accomplishing that through the development of high quality training content. I really love to share the knowledge that I’ve gained with others.

Position

What will I be doing at Puppet? The position I have accepted at Puppet is that of a Principal Field Solutions Developer with the education team. What that means for me is that I get to help with things related to the training and enablement Puppet provides to customers as well as internal Puppet resources. The most amazing part for me is that this includes still being very technical with solution development of the hands on technical training but also the non hands on aspects like documentation and content development.

Portfolio

Puppet is most known for its place within the configuration management space that it occupies with Chef, Ansible and a number of other products. In recent years through acquisition and a number of internally built products Puppet has added other platforms and tools such as Bolt, Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise, and others to its portfolio. Trying to create something out of nothing is challenging but it can also be very rewarding to be part of that process.

Portland

Puppet is headquartered in Portland, Oregon and is where I spent my first week with the company. Since completing my orientation I’ve been working with my distributed team in a remote fashion. I truly love the ability to work remotely and with those that understand some of the challenges of a distributed team. While I’ve worked remotely for an extended period of time in the past I have a greater awareness of some of the difficulties from a professional and personal standpoint. One of the things the team and the broader organization are big on is video calls to help “connect” people.

Profile

My background is in IT operations or system administration. My skillset spans numerous technologies from networking to storage to server and desktop virtualization to security and even the gamut of “DevOps” tools. Most of my career has been spent working with a lot of different technologies on a daily basis. One of the initial thoughts about moving to a vendor or product centric company was potentially limiting future opportunities due to focusing on a narrow set of tools. I honestly believe that it actually give an amazing opportunity to learn aspects of the IT business I would never get otherwise along with a different perspective. Ultimately my most valuable skill is an ability to learn so I feel really comfortable with my decision.

Puppet

The last “P” is Puppet and more of the reason why I chose to work for Puppet. Puppet was the first tool that really propelled me down the whole “DevOps” path and is a tool that I’ve spent quite a bit of time learning and using. In a strange sort of symbolic way I feel like I’m going through a similar journey to Puppet in my professional career. Having had quite a bit of success and now to continue to become better in ways that were previously unexplored.