Make Time To Try Something New with Mitchell Hashimoto

DESCRIPTION Welcome to episode 76 of the I.T. Career Energizer, a weekly podcast where your host Phil Burgess chats with inspiring I.T. professionals, consultants and experts from around the world. On today's episode Phil interviews founder of HashiCorp, creator of Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad, Mitchell Hashimoto. Mitchell is a passionate engineer and professional speaker whose goal is to make the best DevOps tools in the world. Mitchell is also an O'Reilly author and a top Github user in terms of followers, activity and contributions. To find out more about the podcast visit itcareerenergizer.com And remember to "Subscribe" to get new episodes automatically downloaded to your device KEY TAKEAWAYS (00.59) Phil introduces Mitchell and asks him to tell us more about himself and his I.T career. Mitchell eagerly responds to state that for the last 6 years he has been hyper-focused on building out Hashicorp and the open source tools around it. He names DevOp tools such as Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad to give context to his focus. (01.47) Phil asks Mitchell to share a unique career tip with the audience. Mitchell gives the advice of time. He mentions that you should always schedule time, not to go on holiday but to try new things related to what you're trying to achieve. In Mitchell's case this is exploring new cloud based tools to see how they work and how to maintain them in real life projects. Mitchell mentions that by taking this time you can become inspired and keep abreast of the latest technology and this can help in your job (03.13) After hearing Mitchell's advice, Phil asks if he feels that this helps him stay motivated and enthused by what he does. Mitchell responds saying that this time away can keep you innovative and up-to-date with the latest trends (05.53) As a result of hearing Mitchell's worst mistake in his career, Phil asks him to share with the audience his career highlight. Mitchell says that a change in thinking came about with the development of 'Vault' a secrets management tool. It's different to other management tools and now has lots of adoption in businesses and fortune 500 companies (07.07) Phil asks Mitchell to share with the audience what excites him about the I.T industry. Mitchell says that I.T infrastructure is being viewed more and more as disposable machines and as a result it improves stability and makes everything more resilient (09:48) Phil begins the Reveal Round and asks Mitchell what first attracted him to a career in I.T? Mitchell says that he has always gotten a kick out of watching things work the way they are supposed to. Mitchell saw I.T as an opportunity to automate vast fleets of servers to do things for him (12:38) Phil asks Mitchell to share his career objectives, that he's currently focusing on? Mitchell says he is continuing to work on HashiCorp and to continue building confidence in the I.T industry and better integrate Vault and Terraform into more complete packages (16:37) Finally Phil asks Mitchell to share a last piece of advice with the I.T. Career Energizer audience. Mitchell responds to say, focus on automation as we're nowhere near the limit. There's no future without automation and anytime that you are doing a manual task consider how it could be automated BEST MOMENTS (03.09) "Find time to step away from being in the trenches to motivate and inspire yourself" (05.20) "It was misconfigured checks on our IP server that caused no traffic to be sent to the ad server" (06.45) Mitchell Hashimoto mentions that; "Google made an announcement without telling Hashicorp of their integration with Vault" (06:58) Speaking about 'Vault' Mitchell states that "The thing I'm most proud of is not it's success, it's a different way of thinking" (10.21) "What attracted me to I.T was the huge automation problem waiting to be solved (10.28) "The best career advice I've received is to 'do everything' don't focus on one thing and be the best at it, it's the time to do everything and understand what you really love" (17.10) Mitchell confidently states that; "those that have dedicated themselves to automation are wildly successful" ABOUT THE HOST Phil Burgess, an I.T. consultant, mentor, and coach, is the creator and host of the I.T. Career Energizer Podcast. His podcast continues to inspire, assist and guide anybody wanting to start, develop and grow a career in I.T. by inviting successful I.T. professionals, consultants, and experts to share their advice, career tips and experiences. CONTACT THE HOST Website: itcareerenergizer.com LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/philburgess     ABOUT THE GUEST Mitchell Hashimoto is best known as the creator of Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul. Mitchell is the founder of HashiCorp, an open-source software company based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides open source tools and commercial products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run and connect distributed application infrastructure CONTACT THE GUEST LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mitchellh/ Twitter: https://twitter.com/mitchellh @mitchellh Website: https://www.hashicorp.com/