I have at least one existential crisis a week during which I stress out about how much there is to learn and the finite amounts of time and attention I have to do that learning. Someone releases a new cloud service, a new programing language, a new OS, a new micro-nano-pico-container-magic-going-to-change-the-world-thing seemingly every five minutes. Nevermind all the stuff I need to learn in everyday life — how to raise a kid, how to be a better husband, how to get a good deal buying dish soap in bulk.

For as long as I can remember there have been two Microsofts: Microsoft Sales and everyone else. It’s a split that exists in most tech companies, but those that are most successful at the moment have a different divide; Google is Engineering and everyone else, AWS is Engineering and everyone else, Apple is Product and everyone else. But Steve Ballmer is a salesman and that philosophy fit the 90s’ tech scene fairly well, so Microsoft became Sales and everyone else and remained so even after Satya Nadella took over.

If you’re in IT leadership, you’re probably getting flooded right now with salespeople from regional colos and managed services companies trying to get you on-board for their cloud services. Most of those services are just rebranded flavors of what they’ve been offering for years — I’ve seen some ridiculous stuff where a three-year-server lease with colo hosting was being sold as “consumption-based cloud”. It’s a lot of desperate grasps at buzzwords from companies that are years behind the ball.

Of all the arguments that people make against moving their workloads to AWS or Azure, lack of control of vendor staff makes the least sense to me. “The cloud isn’t secure because we don’t control the hiring or their people.” I still have an involuntary eye twitch from the first time I heard this. “They could hire literally anyone off the street and they could get access to our data.

Two years ago, I sat in a room of engineers listening to a Microsoft instructor describe Azure’s Infrastructure-as-a-Service. One of the engineers who worked for a large retailer rolled his eyes at everything the instructor said. It was clear he wasn’t attending out of personal choice. During one of the breaks, I asked him about what his company was doing with cloud and what he was hoping to learn about during the day.

Last year, Jarin Dykstra and I launched BestTech.io with the idea that it would be a little like The Wirecutter for enterprise IT products and services. We created recommendations for Desktops-as-a-Service, Identity-as-a-Service, and several other categories with the hope that other IT people could leverage our research and testing to save time and have at least the outline of a path to the cloud. While designing and building cloud IT for our current employer, we found ourselves constantly reaching for a lifeline that wasn’t there, so we wanted to be that lifeline for others.

If you were to ask me for one thing to do to advance your career, my answer would be: write. Even if no one ever reads what you write, it’s worth it. Writing helps you think things through and work out problems, both personally and professionally. Over time, it also makes you a better communicator, more able to get your ideas onto the table and acted upon. Putting your writing online helps you connect with people.

When people talk about tech communities, they tend to have the coasts in mind – Silicon Valley, Seattle, Boston, Brooklyn. Few cities in the middle of the country stand tall as pillars of tech – Austin, Dallas/Fort Worth, and increasingly Kansas City and Omaha being the exceptions. I know a lot of people who want Oklahoma City to join that club, to be a place where startups prosper and talent gravitates towards.

I’ve found that if you pay attention, there are lessons hiding almost everywhere you look. Sometimes it takes a bit to catch on, but the world is rich with things to learn. Let’s take the standard fast food drive thru as an example. If you go through a drive thru, the process normally goes like this: You get in line behind other cars and wait. Once it’s your turn in queue, you place your order through an intercom in front of a big menu.

My first tech job was with a regional VAR (value added reseller). I started in phone support, then moved up to bench tech, then to field engineer – a path that increased my exposure to customers and the rest of the business with each move. I liked the technical work and helping people with their problems, but as I began to notice the sales engine that was at work around me, I started to dread coming to work.