Nearly a year ago I read Don Jones’ book “Be the Master”. It’s not available any longer as he’s combining two of his books into a larger narrative. There was an excerpt in the book that really struck me as such a poignant explanation of teaching and helping others in our technical community.

We can all point to a guru who helped us through a difficult time or gave us insight that – even years after the fact – proved to be a turning point in our careers and lives. I think everyone should strive to do the same, to be a positive influence in our trades and in our lives. We owe it to the people who have helped us.

And let’s be clear on something – teaching, passing on information, doesn’t always feel rewarding. Ask any primary school teacher. But I don’t feel that teaching needs to be rewarding, although for me it certainly has been on most occasions. Teaching, for me, is a repayment of something that was done for me. It’s a debt that I owe, not to the person who taught me, but to the people I have yet to teach.

Reframing this concept as a debt that I owe hit me like a ton of bricks, and is now permanantly scrawled in my brain. It was one of those aha moments. So armed with my new desire to share my experience and learnings I decided I should write some blog posts. I even reached out to James Petty at powershell.org and asked to be a guest author. The only problem was I never actually wrote anything. Like a lot of things it quickly became one of those “When I have more time” type of excuses.

One day while listening to a podcast I hear the phrase “if it’s not on my calendar it doesn’t exist”. I guess it was just what I needed to hear at the time. So I blocked out an hour early in the morning to write every day and here we are.

So what is my “why?”: It’s simply to share knowledge.

I plan on doing this in two ways

  • Writing - Author articles here (maybe on powershell.org or linkedin too).
  • Speaking - I dread public speaking, always have, but like we say in the DevOps community “if something hurts, do it more”. Need to find some user groups or events to present something at.