RHCE, MCSE, CCNP … When Should I Stop Pursuing IT Certifications?

By Petar Marinkovic, IOD Senior Expert and Mentor
When you are a freshly employed junior in IT, a few certification acronyms look nice on your CV. You don’t have too many projects under your belt, so passing a couple of Microsoft, Cisco, or AWS exams will definitely help you in pursuing and obtaining positions that will kickstart your career. But, when should you stop? When is enough enough? And once you’ve decided it’s enough, and you have more free time, what’s the best way to spend that time in a way that will support your continued growth?
I have to admit, I was a member of the “certification” cult.
(more…)

Continue Reading RHCE, MCSE, CCNP … When Should I Stop Pursuing IT Certifications?

Why Brutal Honesty Is a Must in Tech Marketing

By Trevor Pott
Obfuscation is a longstanding tradition in marketing. While outright lies are generally avoided by reputable organizations today, half-truths and careful omission of facts are still considered normal. In the world of tech marketing, at least, a default approach of obfuscation to marketing can be catastrophic.
The internet exists. People can and do engage in research. Nerds are particularly good at it.  For those who lack research skills, we’re entering an era in which Artificial Intelligence (AI) digital assistants are good enough to detect a marketing team’s obfuscation.
If Amazon’s Alexa, or Apple’s Siri get to the point that they can debunk a claim, or at least add context to one, how long before someone writes a browser plugin for the same thing in real time for every page we view?
(more…)

Continue Reading Why Brutal Honesty Is a Must in Tech Marketing

AWS Summit 2017 in NYC: The Day I Owned Being A Cloud Celeb

By Jen Maidenberg, VP Editorial, IOD
One of the things I really love about working at IOD is our philosophy of transparency. Everything we do – including our communications with customers about the content we create – is honest and forthcoming. This works especially well for me. Why? Because I don’t have to pretend I know more about cloud or DevOps or cybersecurity than I actually do. In another setting, I might feel self-conscious about that. But at IOD, I don’t.
What I am an expert in is storytelling, editing, and messaging. I’m also really good at identifying and nurturing talent. I’m a bit modest off the page (another truth about me) so I won’t list all my credentials in those areas. But suffice it to say, Ofir, our founder and CEO, hired me because of my background in publishing, content marketing, and branding. Also I love getting to know and talking to new people. This is something I have to do often at IOD, as we’re always recruiting new freelancers to our team.
(more…)

Continue Reading AWS Summit 2017 in NYC: The Day I Owned Being A Cloud Celeb

Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It

Do you want to start using Ansible? Are you already using it, but coming up against challenges? Even if you don’t fall into either category, don’t stop reading. I’m going to show you why you might actually need Ansible and how to best take advantage of it..
Ansible’s catchphrase is “simple IT automation,” which is a pretty accurate description of what it does. In its most popular mode of operation (there are several), Ansible is described as a desired state of input, and it manipulates a set of machines to achieve this state. At this point, you may be thinking “yeah, but we’ve already got shell scripts for that.” Ansible, though, offers several advantages over good old shell scripts.
First of all, the playbook, which describes the desired state, is declarative and written in YAML. Using a playbook means you don’t need to handle the error control and condition checking yourself. It also means no actions will be taken if the state is already satisfied (e.g. apt-get won’t run if there’s an nginx package installed).
But this is only part of the story.
(more…)

Continue Reading Why You Might Need Ansible and Not Even Know It