About

About the GeekFluent author, Dave Henry:

DaveThe label “geek” didn’t come until later, but my love of all things tech was clear from age 2 on when I would disassemble whatever I could get my hands on and was clearly obsessed with anything that had knobs, buttons, levers, or sliders that anyone was foolish enough to leave within my reach.  (This still holds true today: If you don’t want something fiddled with or poked at, don’t leave it within arm’s reach of me (or un-firewalled…).)

For college, I went to a very technical engineering school, where a summer job as a third-shift janitor ended up leading to my first full-time job as a Unix systems administrator back in 1987 (long story).  I’ve been earning my living in various IT-related jobs ever since.

Career Highlights

Along the way I:

  • …started out with MIT’s Project Athena.
    …went on to work at two other organizations that were also developing their own versions of Unix.
  • …started as a sysadmin with a company of 28 employees. Before I left about 3 years later, I had a team working for me and the company had grown to about 275 employees.
  • …spent a few years doing independent consulting, most involving security (both data and physical), programming (mostly in some form of automation), and advising on plans for data center moves — before I started the consulting, I’d managed two different data center relocations which meant I’d done two more than most IT folks had.
  • …went back to work full-time at a webhosting company (today they’d be called a Managed Services Provider…), where I led a team of 10 direct reports and established new training programs, one involving matching people with mentors, the other involving the use of videos as a training and team building tool..
  • …incorporated a second business. This time the business grew to a grand total of four employees.
  • …worked for a storage vendor as a sales engineer, a competitive consultant, and a technical marketer.
  • …worked for a value-added reseller (VAR) / systems integrator, where I wore multiple hats including sales engineer, solutions architect, implementation engineer, and engineer providing professional services.
  • …was the first-ever (and only) technical marketer to work for a particular cloud service provider (CSP).
  • …started taking on freelance writing commissions. (If you’re interested in having me write for you, contact me.)

Most recently, I’m now working at Acronis in a Technical Product Marketing role where I’ll be bringing my own type of je ne sais quoi to messaging efforts there.

Community Recognition

I’ve been an active member of a few (mostly) online communities. Some are listed below in alphabetical order.

  • Cisco Champion for Data Center – 2014-2019
  • EMC Elect – 2013-2015
  • NetApp United – 2017-2018
  • VMware vExpert – 2012-2019
  • VMware vExpert Cloud – 2017

About This Site

For over three years, I wrote the official blog of the Everything VMware at EMC online community. For obvious reasons, my writing there was all work-related and somewhat limited in scope, and appropriately so. Having a site of my own allows me to discuss broader topics that interest me, but fall outside the scope of my work.  There has been (and will continue to be) quite a bit of topic-overlap, as I’m fortunate enough to work in a field that I find very interesting and exciting.

Here I’ll be able to talk about a wider variety of topics, like all the cool things you can do with an Android phone, my recent DIM projects, everyday uses for mind maps, my love of whiteboards, other vendors’ storage products, and more virtualization topics.

About the Name

The site name, Geek Fluent, comes from a lot of what I do. I’ve often had conversations about how part of the value I bring at work is that I’m capable of speaking both fluent Geek and fluent Human. A lot of what I’ve done throughout my career has involved finding ways to explain very technical things to non-technical people in a way that has them not just understand, but really get it. (To a lesser, but no less important, extent, some of what I do also involves explaining non-technical things to very technical people.)

Disclaimers

This is my site and no one else’s. Any opinions expressed herein are, therefore, also mine and no one else’s (although I certainly welcome those who share them, as well as civil discussion with those who disagree aren’t yet convinced…).

One thought on “About

  1. Pingback: Managed View » Balance Social Media and Business With EMC Elect

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