Keynote: Looking Back at a Lifetime of Poor Tech Choices
summary
Career stories track concrete outcomes: learning vi on Freenet leads to administering bind, writing HTML and dangerous Perl scripts becomes a side hustle, wrestling with Tivoli and an SMS integration takes months but teaches data normalization, a global monitoring build for 250,000 systems in 5,000 locations collapses after corporate cuts and causes 18 months unemployment, an alert tweak accidentally creates 1,544 tickets then drives a vendor UI fix. Main claim: bad tech choices give real, reusable skills when ownership follows failure.
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Introduction
- 1:25Audience warm-up
- 3:11Myth of poor choices
- 7:27Learning VI editor
- 11:00WordPerfect certification
- 12:50Pre-internet tech news
- 14:37HTML and Perl side hustles
- 15:40Monitoring with Tivoli
- 19:14Move to Switzerland
- 21:00Learning from outages
- 22:27Alert mishap and vendor
- 23:54Paralyzing choices and FOMO
- 26:04Theater degree skills
- 28:29Embracing mistakes
- 31:19Open-source lessons
- 32:43Q&A
related talks
43mKeynote: A tech görl origin story
46mKeynote: Two roads diverged in the woods
42m"How I made a career in the Tech industry writing horrible code"
01h 04mKeynote: Learn Programming, then Learn how to Be a Programmer
27mTell Us Another Story Grandpa: Lessons Learned over 16 Years as a Developer
01h 01mLessons from a lifetime of doing, teaching, managing, and leading technical development
52mKeynote: Yesterday’s Technology is Dead, Today’s is on Life Support
28mLessons learned after more than 20 years working in IT