Keiran Shelden It’s been a while since I have last made a post, but a lot of things have been happening, a lot of new and exciting things – and I would like to share them with you.
After 8 and a half years, today marked my last day working within Education Queensland. it’s been a fun journey, having started out at a local primary school doing a traineeship one day a week, to moving through to a large high school in the end.
In my time working within EQ, I have gained a lot of knowledge that has put me in the position I am today. When I started, I knew enough to get by and to be able to troubleshoot. Once I moved out of my traineeship, I then moved on to a small high school that I was the sole technician, I was walking into a site that had been left unattended for 6 months, this is when things got interesting – The first thing was I had to work out how this site had been set up, second, “How do you use Novell?!?!” That’s right, I had never used Novell. Luckily, it was still running and I just left it alone most of the time (We were less than 6 months away from being migrated to Windows to come uniform with the rest of EQ). The next great thing was I got to a lot of stuff about Macs and gained a really great friendship with the Apple developer in head office, I spent a lot of time testing and learning about Mac development. I then had to move on to another site afterwards, back to a primary school which had more students and more computers, but this was a great place to experience how I could make the most of a small budget, it was a really great experience.
Now the big one, The last 3 years have been my biggest. Each student in one year level had a laptop, this then grew to over 3 year levels while a fraction of the remaining two had their own laptop as well – This was easy, just a lot of logging jobs with the vendor for warranty or accidental repair.
That wasn’t just it, this site was amazing in what it could bring out of me, in the early days I started to study for my MCSE, I then slowly but then suddenly got involved in maintaining the vSphere infrastructure.
June 2013, I remember that month as the month my IT focus shifted and moved in a new direction which has since allowed me in just over a year to accomplish and be apart of some amazing things that can only get better. All of a sudden, I started to read and watch videos on virtualization, within 3 months I was already doing a full site migration from Hyper-V and designing new infrastructure for another company while still working daily at the school. Into the start of this year, we did a full migration from vSphere 4.x to 5.5. The amount of research and lab testing I did at home really taught me a lot. Since June last year, in almost no time I was attending VMUGs, planning potential trips to vForum (timing didn’t work out), buying lots of books from Amazon and getting involved in whatever online group I could involved in Virtualization. The best so far was becoming a vExpert this year. It’s been a great journey.
Now, after that “quick” history lesson, I am proud to announce as of Monday I start my new job working at 6YS Cloud Computing as a System Engineer. This is going to produce some new learning challenges and I am excited. I want make mention at this point of Craig Waters (@cswaters1) post Keep Challenging Yourself as he touches on getting out of his comfort zone to challenge himself to learn and grow. This is what I am hoping for, New Challanges, and I know there will be some from day one as I will need to learn Citrix quickly, and I can’t wait!
I like to call this “End of Chapter 8” as it is the 8th significant time in my life so far. Chapter 9 is about to begin.
Thank you for reading.
Keiran.
