Contributing to the community

Matt Chung itsmemattchung at gmail.com
Tue Jul 3 03:28:05 UTC 2012


I've been so fortunate and appreciative over the years to have colleagues
(many whom I consider my close friends) cultivate my career by providing
sound advise that I will continue to pass on.  In addition to those I've
known personally, I have gleaned a substantial amount of information
through many of you who've contributed to these threads, blogs, and so on.
Within the organizations I've worked for, I have always been an advocate
for sharing knowledge in order for the company to grow collectively; I
truly believe its infectious.  But I digress...

At my previous company (regional WISP) as a network engineer, I was able to
get buy in from the partners to conduct training for our call center in
effort to better support our customers.   By institutionalizing a
methodical approach to troubleshooting (and performing root cause
analysis), we can filter out many potential issues (i.e why check if there
is network connectivity if you are getting an HTTP response - ruled out the
lower stack). That was great however...despite contributing to my
organization, I've always felt that I haven't performed due diligence when
it comes to contributing back to the network/IT community as an entity.
Excuses have been made ("I don't have time") on my part and I realized that
everyone here is a working professional as well. I've never been an active
participant like many of you.

As a person who is passionate about this field (as well as a working
professional), how do you find the time in order to contribute? Do you ever
feel that the post may be redundant? Another factor I've always took into
consideration was the fact that although I may be knowledgeable and
proficient in one facet, someone out there is the true expert (i.e assisted
in developing the RFC) and has a deeper understanding than I do (which I
feel my contribution may be inadequate).


-- 
-Matt Chung



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