This session is an expansion of the fun "Tech Lessons Learned on a Farm" session hosted by the Cincinnati & Denver chapters in December 2022 & 2023.

I've had a truly varied list of roles throughout my career, where I have had to wear many hats, and gained hard-learned lessons from each role based on some unique experiences along the way.

In my technical career, my roles have ranged from SMB to Fortune 500, moving up from cable installer to helpdesk to SysAdmin to Architect. I also gained interesting experience working in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, non-profit, federal organizations, and a cloud service provider, before moving to the vendor side.

During that time, while leading multiple user groups, I've talked to many users with the same questions, concerns, difficulties, and fears as others. During this time, I embraced wearing the brightly colored hats that I've become known for.

There are fundamental lessons that we can all understand from life and our experiences that we should be sharing with everyone. Even then, we don't always know how to apply these to our current technical roles and do not excel at using them to our advantage for our careers.

It doesn't matter where your experience came from, there is something you can share: whether working on a ranch in South Texas, jumping out of planes in the Air Force, breaking through walls Kool-Aid man style to escape a halon system, being pitched on becoming a "choo-choo" engineer, or walking into a dark data center because someone cut the power with a reciprocating saw.

Every experience you have had contains a lesson you can take from it to improve your career and others. In this session, you can hear about my tech & life lessons so you can learn from them and apply the benefits without suffering some of the harrowing experiences yourself.