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Sysadmania! Is Upon Us!
SysAdmin Day is upon us, you SysAdmaniacs! It’s your day! We know how you may feel underappreciated at times throughout the year, so we went all out and created a board game in your honor. That’s right. Now, after another annoying day resetting passwords and resolving bottlenecks caused by I/O-heavy apps, you can unwind…
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Why aren’t we using Containers, and other questions CIOs ask when coming back from a tech conference
Sitting back at the office getting work done, keeping the ship afloat, living the Ops life of the perception of DevOps, only to have your IT Director, VP or CxO come and demand, “Why aren’t we using Containers! It’s all the rage at FillInTheBlankCon!” And they start spouting off the Container of the week, Kubernetes,…
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THWACKcamp and the Long Tail of Technology Learning
THWACKcamp – the annual virtual learning event brought to you by SolarWinds – was amazing this year, in large part because so many live attendees were talking about new challenges IT admins they hadn’t imagined even five years ago. As usual, in our closing thoughts we mentioned that rate of change doesn’t seem to worry the…
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The IT Training Quandary
What do you do when your employer says no more training? What do you do when you know that your organization should move to the cloud or at least some discrete components? How do you stay current and not stagnate? Can you do this within the organization, or must you go outside to gain the skills you seek? This is a huge…
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So You Want To Code? It's Only Logical!
How should somebody new to coding get started learning a language and maybe even automating something? Where should they begin? It's probably obvious that there are a huge number of factors that go into choosing a particular language to learn. I'll look at that particular issue in the next post, but before worrying about…
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New Coder: Which Language Is The Right One?
To paraphrase a lyric from Hamilton, Deciding to code is easy; choosing a language is harder. There are many programming languages that are good candidates for any would-be programmer, but selecting the one that will be most beneficial to each individual need is a very challenging decision. In this post, I will attempt to…
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Mr. Robot: When Cyber Security Fiction Meets Reality
First off, I’d like to introduce myself. My name is Damon, and I am the Managing Editor of Geek Speak. I’m not sure why it has taken me so long to post a blog. But that said, I’d like to thank you all for your continued support of thwack, Geek Speak, and for our amazing contributors. While I’m not exactly versed in IT, I…
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SolarWinds 2016 Head Geek IT Pro-dictions
Hello Geek Speakers, As 2015 comes to an end and 2016 begins, SolarWinds once again tapped its band of experts - the Head Geeks - to take a look inside their crystal balls and provide a glimpse into IT trends to watch for in the coming year. Will their predictions come to fruition in 2016? Let us know what you think and…
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Why is the Email Slow?
This is a common scenario in most organizations: end-users complaining of slow email performance. Sometimes all users experience it, or just a few people (maybe in a specific location, or just randomly). It could also be a home user connecting via VPN complaining that email Web access is slow. IT teams face different types…
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See the Head Geeks in Action: A review of 2015's IT Pro-Dictions
If you follow Geek Speak, you're probably aware of the annual "Head Geek IT Pro-Dictions." That said, we thought it would be fun to have the Head Geeks revisit last years predictions. Last year certainly offered countless technology trends and topics to discuss, deliberate, dissect, and debate. But, were the Geeks right or…