October 7th, 2010

On Gestalt IT’s NetField Day

Posted in Uncategorized

Stephen asked me to send him a quote for his website about my experience at his NetField Day event.  Well, I kind of forgot to do that.

But seeing as how the gist of NetField Day is to introduce technology companies to technologist bloggers and stir it up, foment some discord/discourse, get the conversation going, and create some awareness I felt that maybe the best thing to do was to turn it around and blog about my experience as a presenter at NetField  (TechField) Day.

So I walked into a room, set up a laptop, and got to present to an audience of very opinionated technologists for a couple of hours.

Turns out I agreed with many, if not all of their opinions.  Even the ones I didn’t agree with seemed to be pretty well thought through and not myopic or religious.  That was a good start, sometimes you get these audiences where someone has such a preconceived notion that you worry that you have no chance of connecting with them – I didn’t get that feel at all.

I got to meet Greg Ferro, whose podcast series, Packet Pushers has achieved near-legendary cult status amongst many network folks.  The funny thing is I am not sure even Greg knows how well known he is because of this hobby of his.  I have had four customers in the past two weeks alone mention to me something to the effect of, “Hey, I heard you on Packet Pushers”!  One of the first customers who said that to me went on to become one of our largest customers – I am definitely a Packet Pushers fan now.  (Gratuitous linking)

There was this chap, Ivan, whom everyone was convinced wouldn’t smile.  It was kind of like Mikey on the Life Cereal ads from my youth I guess so I did whatever I could to try to make Ivan smile.  What I really appreciated though was that even though at one point he did crack a bit of a grin at something or other Ivan wrote a mildly chastising piece on me/Arista — Ivan said that we needed to open up our documentation to non-customers.

What I really appreciated though was that I reached out to Ivan, we had a pretty good discussion about the reasons we should or shouldn’t.  We were both quite frank, learned a bit, and I walked away convinced we should do it.  (As I am writing this our docs are being opened up on our staging site, QA’d, and a little bit of housekeeping from an organizational perspective…)  Thanks Ivan!

The candid feedback matters.  Some people have a hard time listening, its even harder when your critic is informed and savvy, and even harder sometimes when they have a prolific pen.  But its great when they can work with you on making your business better.

Stephen and the gang, thanks for having us at your event!

dg