Joe Houghes
Solutions Architect/FullStackGeek/Lazy Operator, Pure Storage
Castle Rock, Colorado, United States
Joe Houghes is a leader of the Denver VMware & PowerShell User Groups, and he's a Sr. Solutions Architect with Pure Storage. He focuses on automating us out of our IT operations while freeing us to perform higher-level tasks.
Joe has been the #1 speaker internationally for VMUG from 2021-2023 for virtual and in-person events. He is continually working to help & encourage the next community speaker(s) to take his place while helping to get them started.
Joe also works to evangelize the message that automation should be a focus for admins & engineers, even though it requires more in-depth thinking and focus beyond performing a task once. He knows that even though it is not always someone's default method, the result is repeatable and consistent.
Joe tries to help others understand why we should do the easy tasks better, and he challenges everyone to push themselves outside of their comfort zone and learn more about any topic of interest.
Joe is a collector of communities as a leader for 2 User Groups, and he's a member of various tech programs: Microsoft MVP, vExpert (Pro), Cisco Champion, Veeam Vanguard, Tanzu Vanguard, plus part of the vBrownBag crew. He tells people not to let fear keep them from sharing their knowledge with others and teaching from their unique perspective.
He's also easy to spot by the bright hat, big grin, and the loud "Howdy Y'all."
Awards
Area of Expertise
Topics
Tech & Life Lessons Learned from Wearing Many Hats in a Career
This session is an expansion of the fun "Tech Lessons Learned on a Farm" session hosted by the Cincinnati & Denver chapters in December 2022 & 2023.
I've had a truly varied list of roles throughout my career, where I have had to wear many hats, and gained hard-learned lessons from each role based on some unique experiences along the way.
In my technical career, my roles have ranged from SMB to Fortune 500, moving up from cable installer to helpdesk to SysAdmin to Architect. I also gained interesting experience working in manufacturing, healthcare, financial services, non-profit, federal organizations, and a cloud service provider, before moving to the vendor side.
During that time, while leading multiple user groups, I've talked to many users with the same questions, concerns, difficulties, and fears as others. During this time, I embraced wearing the brightly colored hats that I've become known for.
There are fundamental lessons that we can all understand from life and our experiences that we should be sharing with everyone. Even then, we don't always know how to apply these to our current technical roles and do not excel at using them to our advantage for our careers.
It doesn't matter where your experience came from, there is something you can share: whether working on a ranch in South Texas, jumping out of planes in the Air Force, breaking through walls Kool-Aid man style to escape a halon system, being pitched on becoming a "choo-choo" engineer, or walking into a dark data center because someone cut the power with a reciprocating saw.
Every experience you have had contains a lesson you can take from it to improve your career and others. In this session, you can hear about my tech & life lessons so you can learn from them and apply the benefits without suffering some of the harrowing experiences yourself.
From PowerCLI to API – Taking Your Automation Skills to the Next Level
This session will focus on how to leverage basic skills with PowerCLI to understand the vCenter API, which many VMware administrators have not interacted with directly, and we'll also learn how to interact with an API.
We will cover some core concepts about PowerShell and PowerCLI, then look at some side-by-side comparisons between native PowerCLI cmdlets, the .NET objects returned by Get-View cmdlet, and finally the vSphere API for automation. We'll also use the vCenter API for reporting and basic automation tasks, while comparing the performance to PowerCLI cmdlets. We'll wrap up with creating a VM from the API Explorer and Postman tso that everyone can see how simple it is to take the first step.
While this may be slightly more difficult to understand, the performance benefits at scale are dramatic, and learning how to interact with the vCenter API can translate to other platforms outside of PowerCLI for automation.
Being Effective at Technical Communication - Technology Not Required
How effective are you at communicating your ideas and plans? Are you as effective when delivering these concepts to your business leaders as to your technical staff?
Being an effective communicator involves being focused on how to deliver the message you are trying to convey. You must ensure that it is delivered in a way that others can understand. You need to deliver your message with 'your' focus removed.
In practice, being effective at communicating means that you must know how to best deliver your message in a manner that your audience can understand.
We will have some specific coverage for what this means as it relates to virtual presentations & meetings, as this can differ from in-person communications.
This talk will discuss the typical obstacles you will encounter, such as non-verbal communication, personalities, emotions, background, audience focus, developing trust, and overcoming virtual communications.
Technical skills are rarely the issue that you will encounter in delivering your message, and we'll discuss how to make sure you are successful.
DevOps 101 for the Systems Admin - Code, Git, CI/CD & Infrastructure as Code
This session will focus on helping everyone to understand the basics of some new core skills that everyone may or may not have.
We will start with some basics & best practices of PowerShell & PowerCLI, run through a demo of using Git for source control, see a simple CI/CD pipeline for updating templates for your VMware environment, and then quick demos using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools - Terraform & Ansible.
These concepts & tools may either be entirely new to you, or they may be components that you haven't wired together yet, so this session is about putting these pieces together to understand how to do it effectively.
How to Excel As a Great Mentor and Mentee
Do you know what is required to be a great mentor? Were you also aware that there is a way to be a better mentee?
This session will help you to better define your goals, identify potential weaknesses, and determine the best areas in which a mentor can help you improve.
You can get huge personal and professional gains if you leverage the help of any advisor who is willing to boost your skills.
Building upon this, one of the best ways to better yourself can be to mentor someone.
You don't need to be an expert in any field, and it doesn't have to be technical in nature, but you will need some skills to do this effectively.
Lessons Learned about Automation - SysAdmin to Architect to User Group Leader to Author
This is a session based upon lessons that have been learned through a career progressing from SysAdmin to Architect, then partner, consultant, and now vendor Solutions Architect.
It counters these lessons with the things I have seen and discussed as a leader of multiple user groups, including 2 PowerShell User Groups More flavor is added by my experience with editing and manuscript reviews for major publishers and the PowerShell Conference Book. Finally, with writing a book on automation focused on the logic and reasoning for what we are trying to accomplish, I see this is not a typical roadmap when starting with basic automation.
There are many considerations to automation that go far beyond basic scripting, and I think this is a bit different from the normal perspective of starting to script and getting more advanced over time. I hope that looking at the broader picture and considerations will lead to more in-depth conversations about automation, both in the session and after.
How To Leverage Being a Geek in the Tech vCommunity to Elevate Your Career
In this session, we'll discuss lots of topics focused on our personal & professional passions and sharing those with others. No matter the technology we work with daily, or if we share an outside interest in things like video games, sci-fi/fantasy movies & books, or non-IT technology like home automation and Plex, we are all part of user groups for our desire to be part of a strong community with a shared purpose.
Many of us have found assistance, gained skills, enjoyed some camaraderie, or made friends within this community. Unfortunately, not enough of our community members are leveraging the vCommunity to power up their careers.
By putting in some effort to share with the community, make deeper connections with others, and have some open conversations, we all have a wealth of resources available to us. Whether your focus is around your own goals & career aspirations, a desire to branch out into different skills & roles, or even increase your chances of earning a promotion or higher pay & greater benefits, these are all desires that we can help each other to achieve.
In my opinion, we are all Geeks in this tech community based on our love of different interests and our passion for sharing mutual topics.
However, I want to make sure that everyone learns how else we can leverage this community to benefit everyone, enhance our relationships, achieve our own goals, and give back to strengthen the community by helping others.
Using GitHub Actions to Automate Terraform for Azure
In this session, we'll run through some basics of Azure, Terraform and Github actions. Then I'll demo the following:
Create an Azure service principal via Azure CLI for automation
Create an Azure resource group with Terraform via CLI
Create a YAML file for GitHub Actions workflow (for leveraging the Terraform-GitHub-Actions extension)
Use GitHub Actions to execute our Terraform config and build Azure resources including:
-Virtual network, subnet, public IP
-Traffic manager
-Virtual machines
-Kubernetes cluster
Leveraging Pipelines for Custom VM Templates
Leveraging a StackStorm pipeline to create a VM template following a workflow.
This session will cover a workflow which enacts the following steps:
ServiceNow incident opened for new VM template
GitHub Repo cloned
Packer to deploy template from spec
Configure VM template with Puppet
Validate the template build
Feed metadata into ServiceNow CMDB & create CMDB entry
Close incident
SQL Saturday Baton Rouge 2023 Sessionize Event
psconf.eu 2023 Sessionize Event
PowerShell + DevOps Global Summit 2023 Sessionize Event
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