Welcome to episode 132 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 Jonathan Frappier’s story of being part of the vBrownBag crew, recognizing he was headed toward burnout, and the methodology for stepping back to focus on what was important.
Original Recording Date: 06-16-2021
Jonathan Frappier has been in technology for about 20 years and at present is focused on supporting applications that are customer facing and for internal teams running on AWS. Check out part 1 of the interview with him in Episode 131.
Topics – Joining vBrownBag, A Step Back, Burnout, Giving Something Up, Learning and Applying Scrum
3:07 – Joining vBrownBag

* Jonathan got involved in vBrownBag at one point.

* It is somewhere between a webinar and an informal learning platform.
* Participating was partially for learning something new but also for increasing exposure gaining the skills to get that next job.
* The vBrownBag really started as an informal study group. Each person would take a topic and present back to the group.
* The content from vBrownBag was extremely helpful to Jonathan when studying for his VCP-DCV.
* Cody Bunch (a founder of vBrownBag) sent out a call for help, and with Jonathan using the content to study already, he decided to participate, starting with video editing and posting vBrownBag content to YouTube.

* This kind of experience could be made to whatever Jonathan wanted it to be and allowed him to gain speaking experience.

* After they finished the VCP series of broadcasts, the vBrownBag team had to figure out what to do next, so they polled their audience and co-workers for some ideas. DevOps was top of mind as one example of the next thing people needed to learn.
* Now the breadth of the vBrownBag topics is massive.

* Nick thought maybe vBrownBag propelled Jonathan into the role at EMC, but that is not quite right.

* When Jonathan first started at EMC, he was still in the background at vBrowBag and had not hosted a show or done a presentation.
* One of the things Jonathan did not plan on at EMC and did not come up in interviews is that he and his teammates had to teach the courseware and labs they put together.
* Jonathan was nervous after finding this out, but getting through the first couple of classes and being able to answer questions from highly technical people helped him get gain confidence.

* As a result he was more willing to participate in the public facing aspects of vBrownBag (hosting shows, presenting, asking questions).
* This led Jonathan to presenting at VMworld and other user group meetings.
* Nick mentioned this is building career capital and part of that body of work.

* Jonathan’s manager at EMC was supportive of the team and helped them through their inexperience, iterating through different courses and labs to build the right content.

* Some courses had to be rushed out and were built only on product videos because the team could not get their hands on the software / hardware to tinker i...