Musings from the early days

I remember a day many years past when Renee and I were sitting in the office at our unfinished wooden door blank desks and someone asking, "what do you want to be when you grow up?"

Now, this was probably 1999 or 2000. Both of us were adults. I was married. Renee was married or was about to be. And she had been dating and living with her partner for several years...well, the point is, we were both adults with professions. Asking what we wanted to be when we grew up was a bit of a joke. We were adults with careers...but we were also sitting at desks made from door blanks. In an office with a dart board. And a ping pong table. I wore bowling shirts. We made logos for a fake movie production company. We had Lego sets at our desks. I had a Marvin the Martian Pez dispenser on my desk.

But we rolled out Microsoft Exchange and migrated the entire company to our new email server in about 10 days. Servers installed and racked, OS loaded, Exchange loaded, new DNS servers setup and DNS records updated, mailboxes created, code written and tested to migrate mailboxes, data moved, email running and everyone happy. When we got our first run of 1U Compaq DL360 servers we racked and stacked them, built them, and had them running in hours. We routinely were working 20 hour days in peak season.

It didn't feel real. We didn't feel like we were working with jobs and careers. So, of course, we felt like there would come a day when we actually had to grow up and get real jobs.

So, what did Renee and I want to be? It's funny because we both kind of settled on the same thing. We wanted to sit in a room reading the newspaper (what are thooooose???) with people asking us questions and we could give them our sage advice.

After many many years as a practitioner, I've meandered back into consulting and Renee has gone independent after many years as an industry analyst.

I guess we grew up.

The podcast is going to be an exploration of past, present, and future seen through our eyes. We've both "been there done that" kind of people. I've run huge global engineering and delivery teams. Renee has worked with every market leader across most industry categories helping sort out risk, controls, governance, compliance, sustainability and much more. We get to look back at how things used to be, how they are now, and how we think the world will change using our shared experiences.

And since we've known each other and worked together for so long, it's kind of like going back to those old dot-com days and it feels kind of like being kids again.

I hope you enjoy our nostalgic musings as we put down our thoughts on tape. Well, not exactly tape.