I’ve been adjusting my studies to focus on data. Right now, I’ve working on mastering Power BI, a Microsoft data analytics tool. Yesterday, as I’m finally starting to dive deep, I had a moment of sadness. I remember a role where this tool didn’t exist. I was cleaning up data from a multitude of sources, just me, Excel, and a wee bit of Visual Basic. And I had to tweak the process every month. The powerful tools in Power BI, and Power Query, would’ve been so helpful. I’m looking forward to what I can do with these modern tools.
Category: Information Technology
Information technology has long been an interest and a passion. Over the years, I have done the following to pursue this part of me.
I earned an Associate in Technical Arts in Web Application Development degree, as well as certificates in:
- Business Systems Analysis
- Requirements Analysis
- Database Theory and Design
I also studied the following topics:
- Cisco Networking
- Desktop Support
- Cloud Computing Systems, mainly AWS
The following posts are based on that interested.
Another Course Completed: System Administration and IT Infrstructure Services
I’m making my way through the Google IT Support Professional Certificate. I appreciate the refresher of many of my courses from pursuing my ATA in Web Application and Cloud Development. It may seem counterintuitive that I took two classes in CISCO Networking and one (of two) classes for the A+ certificate. But I saw value in them and did my best to fit them in.
And I’m getting to learn some new stuff, too. For instance, even though I’ve been managing Active Directory, I’ve not had the chance to dive deeply into things like Group Policies. And having an overview of data backups and disaster recovery was very insightful.
So, I have two more courses to go to finish this Certificate. I have a few different directions I can go once I finish this. The most obvious is to leverage my existing work in IT Administration and start exploring network administration. Another option, which builds more on my ATA is data systems (data analytics, database administration, that sort of thing). I do a fair amount of that right now, too. Less so in my work at the Edmonds Waterfront Center, but there’s quite a bit of alignment with what I’m doing at Trinity. I’ve been feeding a lot of ideas, my backgound, etc, into ChatGPT, and it’s recommending the data path. That seems good as I’m seeing things like “The outlook for network administrator jobs is mixed, with the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) projecting a decline in employment by 3% from 2023 to 2033”. And then this “The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) has projected substantial growth for occupations related to data analysis, with some categories seeing increases as high as 23% or more between 2023 and 2033.”
I’m trying to keep moving forward, to keep learning relevant skills. The world is changing so fast, one must work to keep up.
AI Impacts On Admin Work
I’ve heard a LOT about the expected impacts of AI on developers. When I was laid off right at the beginning of the pandemic, I opted to make a career pivot into Web Development, so I’ve paid attention to this trend closely. Add in all the lay-offs within the whole developer community, and this career, so recently highly lucrative, has become rather bleak. So much so that I’ve been looking backwards at returning to admin work (which is one of my two jobs right now). Now I see that admin work will be getting hit pretty hard by AI, too.
Earlier this week, I was on a Google Meet. With that, we used the built-in tool to create meeting notes. And, my God, it worked nicely! I was quite impressed. Now, as a long-time admin, taking and distributing meeting notes has been a significant part of my work. I’m confident that this will be done by AI going forward. And I expect that transition to be pretty quick.
Another key part of being an admin is scheduling travel. I expected AI to be able to coordinate travel pretty well. So, I did an experiment where I gave ChatGPT a very rough itinerary for a multi-stop business trip, asked it to recommend flights and hotels. It did a nice job with a few extra prompts. I had a pretty solid itinerary within 2 minutes. Impressive.
After just these two considerations, I am confident that AI will revolutionize Admin work significantly. With the job outlook for this work bleak (BLS projects a loss of 12,400 admin jobs between 2024 and 2034), and AI eroding the work, I expect it to become harder to find roles. (Yet it’s the main type of work I’m recruiters reach out to me for…go figure). It makes my decision to pivot to web development during the pandemic, and now shifting to data analysis seem that much more prudent.
Anyway, onwards!
Ah, Good Ol’ Email Scams
This one was sent to me today. Now, back in the day I used Dashlane, but I deleted that account years ago. That was my first clue that this was a scam. Now, let’s explore this further.
This one has a few other easy ways to see that it’s a scam. The first is the email address it was sent from. Notice, the sender is NOT Dashlane.
The second comes when you hover over the action button:
Again, nothing to do with Dashlane.
There’s no way to know if the scammers “know” I had a Dashlane account due a data breach which has been dumped on the dark web, or is just a random guess. They usually send these sorts of messages out by the thousands: a purely numbers game. But it doesn’t matter. The investment from the criminal is minimal, so they only need a few clicks to make this payoff.
In the end, be careful out there.
Tech Support Flowchart
As someone who works in IT, I find this flowchart funny. Well, I’m pretty amused by everything that xkcd posts.
Anyway, I hope you have a delightful and refreshing weekend.
Seth Godin’s “The Use (And Design) Of Tools”
As I read Seth’s post today, I started wondering how tools like AI can be impacted by, or actually impact the attitude of “Too Busy To Learn”. I think one of AI’s key potentials is to make the need to understand the tool’s operation non-essential (think coding).
Mainly, I think the future will be dominated by those who understand the tools, not by the people who can simply operate them.
It’s Love Your SysAdmin Day
Well, it was a few days ago.
TLDR: This manager was forced to let the best sysadmin he’d ever worked with go (ah, economics!). So, he posted this post to Reddit, and got amazing results.
The community rose up and have kinda crowdsourced said admin a new job. This is so cool to see! This is the kind of person I strive to be, so it’s particularly nice to see that valued and rewarded.
Aspirations are a good thing to have, methinks.
All Hail The Sysadmins!
I’ve long loved the webcomic xkcd. This one drifted through my inbox and thought it worthy of all the sysadmins I know.
As far as my own sysadmin skills, I do hate running cables and (shudder) crimping connectors. As I only have one thumb, these evolutions are rather uncomfortable, and sometimes painful.
Anyway, sysadmin types out there, you have my respect and admiration! Keep that uptime high!
Today’s Podcast
One of my favorite things is listening to podcasts on my walks. During today’s walk (you can check that out on Strava, if you care) I listened to Saturday’s (June 8) Geekwire podcast: “How This Professor teaches AI and thinks about human creativity“. Featuring Léonard Boussioux, I appreciated his positive outlook on the potential that AI offers. I agree with those folks who think AI is in a hype-cycle. However, that doesn’t mean that there are no gains or innovations that will be coming out of this. I deeply believe this technology will be significantly transformative. However, I doubt it will be as destructive as some predict, nor as positive as others are thinking.
I also appreciate that they touched on the sustainability issues surrounding AI. Huge amounts of energy and water are part of this equation. These will be key elements for the efficacy of this technology.
I have a few ideas that I want to explore with AI tools. These tools will be critical ones to learn and master. I’m confident many jobs that will be replaced by AI, will create new roles on the other side of this equation.
They had a side discussion looking at the ethics of using AI to enhance photography, and what should be disclosed. Todd Bishop, one of Geekwire’s founders, used an AI tool to enhance (de-noise is the phrase they used) an image. When I first heard the situation, I thought that disclosing was unnecessary. Mainly, I don’t see any difference between “de-noising” and color-correcting, or cropping. As they went on and explored the issue, I shifted to thinking disclosure is the wisest course. As I respect the distrust many feel towards AI, so it makes sense to just be conscientious.
There’s so much that AI is challenging in our lives. I really appreciated this unique dive into it.
What do you think? Let me know in the comments.
Another Step Forward
Today I finished Google’s Operating Systems and You: Becoming a Power User certificate. I have two more to complete in order to finish the Google IT Support course. Initially, it was nice to refresh on a lot of the material that I studied completing my Associates in Information Systems. We’re pushing through that now, which is pretty cool. In particular, diving deeper into Linux is something I’ve really wanted to do. This wasn’t terribly deep, but I enjoyed the Linux focused labs, which took me a bit.
I’m still exploring what I want to do after this cert. There are so many options within the world of tech. I could dive deeper into systems administration, or I could move into data analysis. I really enjoyed my studies into data systems and structures. And I enjoy my current IT role.
More soon!