A Natural Tinkerer

Being true to your lights can lead to a successful career.In this #NomadFuturist podcast, Phil and Nabeel interview Sagi Brody, the Chief Technology Officer for Webair, a leading Cloud and IT Infrastructure solutions provider headquartered in New York.Brody was a natural tinkerer from childhood, moving from Lego to disassembling and reassembling his first Gateway computer at the age of thirteen.“I’d open up my machine to upgrade memory or just to poke around and I’d break it!  And I’d keep frying the board because I’d do it wrong and I’d call them up and they’d send me a new one. Fortunately, they had a great warranty!”While in high school he became interested in coding and networking, moving on to working at a hosting provider as a side job while he was in college. That’s where he met his future business partner Michael Ohayon who invited him to join his nascent hosting company. Brody left college to work full-time at Webair where he has worked since 1998. He shares why he enjoys working at a smaller company:“When you are a technology provider your customers are asking you to do all these different things.And you’re constantly being pushed to the edge. So, it’s a great place to learn.”Brody recognizes that the high pressure to learn the latest and greatest technical skills can take the fun out of learning. He believes learning should be driven by a strong desire to achieve a goal or to explore one’s own natural curiosity.Some guidance for young people entering the field:Learn a technology in the context of a passion you have rather than learning a tool or coding language because you think it’s what’s expected of you.Develop skills such as troubleshooting, researching and technical writing, which will become important as you transition from engineering to management.His final thoughts:This is a great industry and there are so many aspects of it that are just in their infancy. I think that anyone who is looking to get involved in any of the aspects, if it’s cloud, if it’s security, if it’s networking… it’s all good!Sagi Brody is responsible for all technical infrastructure, design, and operations at Webair, one of the largest cloud providers in the Northeast region of the United States, servicing the United States, Canada, Europe, and APAC markets. Brody has been involved in all aspects of the hosting and data center industry including: site surveys and selection, data center buildout and upgrades, fiber network design and build, authoring of client interfaces, software design for data center and server automation, cloud computing, green data center technologies, resource management, staffing, and budget planning. Among many other achievements, Brody has built Webair’s Content Delivery Network (CDN) that provides high speed downloads from anywhere in the world.