Welcome to episode 124 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two Pre-Sales Technical Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we share part 2 of our interview with Josh Duffney and discuss .
Original Recording Date: 05-03-2021
Josh Duffney is a Content Developer for Microsoft. He writes content on docs.microsoft.com and focuses on Ansible, Terraform, PowerShell, and Azure CLI. Catch part 1 of our interview with him in Episode 123.
Topics – Stack Overflow, Writing a Book, Moving to Microsoft, Learning to Focus, Job vs. Career, Closing Thoughts
2:52 – Working at Stack Overflow

* Josh worked for Tom Limoncelli at Stack Overflow. Tom authored The Practice of System and Network Administration and Time Management for Systems Administrators.
* Tom understood deep work and that engineers need time to focus.

* It was impressive to see Tom’s command line knowledge in action. As a manager he was extremely technically savvy.
* Josh is now moderately competent in vim / vi.
* As part of Stack Overflow, Josh no longer had to be a DevOps advocate. It was built into the organization. On Mondays he would join a stand up with the development team.
* Josh had a front seat and insight into what software features were going to be released and why. In other organizations, it might have taken years to even know the application’s name.
* Working for Tom was amazing, and it was a fantastic, extremely talented team.

* Josh had been a user of the Stack Overflow platform but not much of a contributor before joining the company.
* The people at the very top are still people, and they make mistakes. Everyone on the team was extremely respectful and humble, being receptive to the ideas of anyone at any level.

* Don’t hold people in high positions up on a pedestal because you can attain that as well.

6:36 – Writing a Book

* Josh wrote Become Ansible before joining Stack Overflow.

* At the time he had no other outlet. Pluralsight did not have room in their catalog for Ansible content at the time.
* Previous to this, Josh experienced some health issues. After recovering from them he did not dive back into community right away.
* There was a two year period where he was dark from a community standpoint and dedicated himself to his job.
* Josh had acquired a wealth of knowledge in bringing Ansible into a large organization that was mostly Windows. There were some struggles to onboard the technology, and it did not seem like there was something in the market that captured this experience.
* Josh felt like he needed to get the knowledge out of his head, and he had always wanted to write a book.

* After speaking to others who had written a book and struggled to get it published, Josh listened to a great episode of the Writer on the Side Podcast in which some...