For the past few months I've been involved in a case study project with some colleagues at Cisco where we've been researching what the most relevant software skills are that Cisco's pre-sales engineers could benefit from. We're all freaking experts at Outlook of course (that's a joke ?) but we were interested in the areas of programming, automation, orchestration, databases, analytics, and so on. The end goal of the project was to identify what those relevant skills are, have a plan to identify the current skillset in the field, do that gap analysis and then put forward recommendations on how to close the gap.

This probably sounds really boring and dry, and I don't blame you for thinking that, but I actually chose this case study topic from a list of 8 or so. My motivation was largely selfish: I wanted to see first-hand the outcome of this project because I wanted to know how best to align my own training, study, and career in the software arena. I already believed that to stay relevant as my career moves along that software skills would be essential. It was just a question of what type of skills and in which specific areas.

So for the past 7 months of this project, I've been spending a good deal of my time with software on the brain. I've spoken with many of my colleagues on the subject of software skills, programmability, automation, and so on. I've heard from senior Cisco executives on how being capable in the software space is what will allow Cisco to expand to new markets and talk to new buying centers within its many customers. And I've had very, very thought-provoking discussions with my case study teammates on what we think the future looks like for infrastructure engineers in a software-dominated world.

Along the way my thinking changed from "I need to know what to learn" to "I need to dive right in and be fully immersed in this world of software". It quickly became less important for me to understand what precise software skills were necessary to be relevant (which was the aim of the case study) and much more important to realign my career in a software-oriented direction. Soon I couldn't get this saying out of my head: "Software is eating the world". And I realized that software is where the innovation is really happening. Software is where customers and consumers actually realize the bulk of the value of their infrastructure and gadgets. Software is accessible and exciting.

And that's when just the right job rolled into my inbox from LinkedIn (I know, amazing right? Those annoying "We found jobs for you!!$@" emails actually showed some value).

Today is my first day as a Solutions Architect with Amazon Web Services where I'll be helping customers understand, migrate-to, and adopt AWS cloud services. And unlike the last time I announced a job change, there's no relocation this time (nor will there be a false start at a relocation ?); I'll be working from Calgary.

This change in job is also going to allow me to refocus my blogging. I know I have an awful lot to learn about AWS as a platform and I'm looking forward to taking that point of view as an AWS noobie and translating it into blog articles that can help others who find themselves on the same learning path that I'm starting on.

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