Wow what a year 2012 has been. In the Spring I had the privilege of joining the Tech Field Day crew at Network Field Day 3. That expieriance was amazing. Not only was I able to engage with some of the top vendors in the Networking Industry but also hang with the top minds in the networking industry not tied to vendors. Perfect proof of this is Derick Winkworth (@cloudtoad) who in the past year was scooped up by Juniper Networks and rightfully so. I don’t think it can be overstated how important it is to surround yourself with a community of people who are straight up smarter than you. It really pushes you to be better and learn more.
Right on the heals of that great experience I started making some changes here on StaticNAT.com. Thanks to Greg Ferro (@etherealmind) I gained some new insight into how to deal with blogging. A big step was to move to the Genesis Framework which simplifies SEO and management aspects of a WordPress Site. But the biggest changes have started happening over the past few months thanks to the work of another blogger Pat Flynn and his blog SmartPassiveIncome . Pat’s blog and Podcasts have really energized me about what we can really do with StaticNAT and other sites we are working on.
We have introduced a new blog series called a Few Easy Steps. This series is really what I always intended StaticNAT.com to be from when it started in 2007. I would highly recommend you check out this series and add us to your RSS reader, bookmarks or whatever means you use to remember to check us out from time to time. To date we have published 22 of these articles that allow the reader to walk away and do something right away with that they have just read. Most of these posts have been dealing with very entry level configurations steps around Cisco IOS devices. In the near future we have plans to extend this series not only into configuration of other networking devices but move into server configuration as well. Keep and eye out because there is much more to come.
Also this year I had the amazing opportunity to stand side by side with my friends from Nutanix and talk about their product from a clients perspective at VMWorld. First off I don’t know of any other vendors with the guts to say “hey dont talk to my SE talk to this guy who runs our product everyday and ask him about your use case”, amazing! Second this trip afforded me the opportunity to interact with the great marketing team at Arista and also meet Chris Hoff (@beaker) and Abner Germanow (@abnerg) both of which help solidify my thoughts on Juniper as not only the network gear (MX, EX and SRX) I was going to deploy but as real thought leaders in the networking space.
Once of the most exciting things about all of this is that I get to start saying WE are doing things here at StaticNAT. In the past few years I have been fortunate to have the opportunity to start building a dream team of engineers to take on some of the most challenging issues facing us in IT. Those engineers are passionate and driven to learn. What is more is that they are keen to share their knowledge and experiences with others. On the horizon we have Posts about JunOS, EOS, F5, Sonicwall, MS Server, MS Lync, MS AD, Nutanix, Netapp and a whole host of other items…stay tuned.
We have also had the opportunity to launch partner sites to StaticNAT in the past few months. The first was born out of the idea that google search is a great tool for us it often is cluttered with pay for help sites and in general the flotsam and jetsam of the internet. The great thing is that Google agrees with this idea and offers Custom Search Engine. In general this allows us to create a custom search engine based on curated sites based on the subject matter of the search. I posted about this here, check out the three searches in the article to see what I am talking about. The first site we launched around this idea was NetworkSuperSearch, here you will find a curated group of sites that includes the major vendors which you can search for network related information. Soon we will be adding a list of the sites that are part of the search base. I highly encourage you to comment and recommend new sites to the search! As a community we can make this tool as powerful as we want. Along these same lines this past week we quietly rolled out ServerSuperSearch which is being curated by one of our team members, Wes Kennedy (@livearchivist). And you guessed it this will be a search engine dedicated to all things server.
As usual I have gone on way to long but as I get ready to push this out to the masses I wanted to add that we have a whole lot more coming in 2013! Among the things on the way are a series of interviews with the people that make our community tick, I think its time we get to know them and not just what they think about IT and Networking. I already have two big names that I am stunned want to talk with me but I am thrilled to have them. But I dont want to put the ACK before the SYN so I’ll post more as we wrap up the first recordings.
Thank you so much for following us in our ongoing adventure online and I hope to get lots more feedback as we push into this next year.