Category: Career Development

Why Tessell?

It’s been a long time, since I’ve used the Blog-o-matic 9000. There’s been a lot of change in my life since the last time I wrote something here.

Some of the highlights:

  • My wife gave birth to our 4th child Luca
  • Joined Lacework after almost 4 successful years at Zerto
  • Moved from Charlotte, NC to Charleston, SC
  • Attended President’s Club at Lacework for exceeding my sales quota
  • Moved from being a sales engineer to a team lead, and then a sales engineering manager.
  • After almost 2.5 years and a great run, I decided to leave Lacework and join Tessell as the Director of Sales Engineering for the Eastern United States.

Now some of you may be asking, who? Who or what is Tessell? I’m glad you asked.

Tessell provides fully managed, high-performance database as a service (DBaaS) for your choice of engine on your choice of cloud. In layman’s terms, we’ll run your most critical workloads for you, and do it faster and in most cases, for less money, than other options with a much smaller learning curve.

So why did I leave a place where I found tremendous success to join a place that hasn’t seen that same level? Short answer, vision. Tessell has a ton going for it:

People

  • The founding team of Bala Kuchibhotla, Bakul Banthia, and Kamal Khanuja have been working together for a long time and have a proven expertise in the field. They’ve built solutions at Oracle and Nutanix prior to building Tessell. Their vision was a huge piece of why I wanted to come here.
  • I am fortunate enough to work with some former Lacers like Tim Moxness, Michael Atkinson, Ryan Kilpatrick and Ben Williams, who I have had great success with. The fact that these folks really care about solving customer problems and not just pushing software is important to me, especially because of my background being a customer.

Technology

  • I’ve heard of a lot of products that sounded too good to be true. VMware, Pure Storage, Rubrik, Zerto, to name a few. I’ve bought each of them and seen each one solve real world problems firsthand. Tessell gives me the same vibe. Each one of these vendors have a great technical value proposition, but they also affected the people in my organization in a positive way.
  • I’ve always loved when organizations can get the most out of technology. When they can find a different way to get the most out of an already innovative tech. What Tessell has done, is take NVMe compute shapes in the cloud and make them durable. Meaning, grab all the horsepower that you need to run your apps but don’t worry about data loss. They’ve also found a way to do this at a lower cost, and higher performance (thank you NVMe) than other solutions out there. That’s pretty cool.
  • The other thing that I love is that Tessell takes your database administrators (DBAs) and it super charges them. Tessell takes complicated tasks that the most senior folks typically need to work on, and it makes those tasks seem trivial. In doing so, this enables newer or less experienced team members to handles tasks that are above their experience level.

The Future

  • Tessell hasn’t been here long. The company was founded in 2021. The vision though, is a solid one. To be THE DBaaS for the cloud. Any cloud, any database, at YOUR TERMS. I’m so excited to be on board and ready to help build the next great cloud company.

Stay tuned for more content on Tessell. I’m planning on diving deeper into the what, how, why of Tessell itself soon. For now, check us out here:

Website – https://www.tessell.com/

LinkedIn – Tessell | LinkedIn

YouTube – Tessell – YouTube

Tips, Habits & Grit – What Successful Engineers do to Advance their Careers

Hello #vCommunity friends. Today I’m going to share a presentation that I gave recently at the Atlanta VMUG UserCon event. This was originally going to be a joint presentation between myself and my good friend Ariel Sanchez. Due to a scheduling conflict though, Ariel was unable to attend so I made it my own. The premise is a simple one. What have we as engineers done over the years to be successful? What are some of the tips and tricks that we picked up over the years that we can pass on to you all?

This topic came about over a number of conversations that Ariel and I had over the years. I even had the bright idea of trying to turn it into a book at one point but life got in the way of that. At least that is the excuse that I am going with. I did however write a previous blog post on this topic, which you can find here: How To Be An Awesome IT Professional

This presentation however, is a more up to date version of that post.

The topics that I focused on are the ones that I find most important. This list may be different for you, but that’s OK. Although, if you have other ideas, I’d love to hear them. The topics that I covered are as follows:

  • Be Educated
    • Never Stop Learning
    • Get certified, for the right reasons
    • Know your role, and its expectations
  • Be Organized
    • Develop good habits and routines
    • Create and follow standards
    • Learn how to create and maintain documentation
    • Automate as much as possible
    • Leave a place better than you found it
  • Be Like Water
    • Adapt, improvise and overcome
    • Adopt a growth mindset
    • Be a failure and learn from it
    • Have a Plan B
  • Be Vulnerable
    • “I don’t know” is OK
    • Don’t be afraid to ask for help
    • Find a mentor(s)
  • Be a Detective
    • Learn troubleshooting skills
    • Knowing the answer is not as important as being able to find the answer
    • RTFM – Read the Friendly Manual
    • Create a blog and use it as your own personal help file
  • Be Approachable
    • Don’t be that person……seriously, they suck
    • Break out of your shell
    • Be uncomfortable
    • Try to find ways to say yes
    • Be a good teammate
  • Be Collaborative
    • You’re not alone
    • Share the knowledge
    • Train others
    • Be “social”
    • Participate
  • Be Dependable
    • If you say you’ll do it, DO IT!
    • Earn a reputation for getting things done
    • Always have integrity
    • Do the little things
    • Listen and W.A.I.T (Why am I talking?)
    • Give your full attention to others
    • Volunteer to help
  • Be The Business
    • Know what your business does
    • Know your role in the business
    • Take a business approach to technical challenges
  • Be A Mentor
    • Give back
    • Lead by example
  • Be Rested
    • You can’t be on all of the time
    • Time management is critical
    • Maintain a work/life balance
    • Don’t lose sight of what is important to you
    • Burnout is real
    • Be present
  • Be Relentless
    • Never stop improving
    • Keep learning
    • Ask questions
    • Be curious
    • Be your best self
    • YOU ARE AN EXPERT WHETHER YOU KNOW IT OR NOT!

Check out the slide deck below and please reach out to me at @NScuola on Twitter with your thoughts on what I covered. I hope that these tips are helpful in your career journey. I’m always willing to discuss this topic 1 on 1, to a group, over video chat, the phone, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, you name it. I’d love to get more of a discussion going around this topic as I think it is critical. If this is something that you’d like to see in a podcast or video form, let me know that too. Please enjoy, share and make my slide deck below your own. See you next time.

Tips, Habits & Grit – What Successful Engineers do to Advance their Careers

NOTE: We will be presenting this topic again at the #ChicagoVMUG UserCon on October 24th. If you’re going to be in Chicago, please come by Salon 8 at 4:15 PM and join in the discussion. You can register for the event here: Chicago VMUG UserCon 2019

Upgrade Your Technical Skills Using a Business Approach

It’s been a while since I posted but with #Blogtober kicking off, I figured that this was as good a time as any. Here’s a bit more about Blogtober itself straight from the source. Thanks for the Motivation Matt!

This is going to be a short post with some links to content. I recently got on stage at VMworld for the first time. I submitted a topic to the vBrownBag call for content around the importance of not only understanding the technical aspects of your career but also the business aspects.

This concept has been particularly eye opening for me especially in the last 5-10 years of my career. I was always technically sound and took pride in doing a great job in all that I set out to do but there was something missing. I wasn’t even aware of it at first. It wasn’t until I worked with someone who clearly knew the importance of knowing the business along with the technical that it finally clicked for me. I told this story during a Meet the Expert interview with @arielsanchezmor here (fast forward to the 12:15 mark for the story):

Long story short, how can you know how to architect a solution if you don’t know the business outcome that you are trying to solve for. That’s really what the point of this presentation was, I wanted to take the business oriented approach that I use and share it with all of you. Rather than trying to transcribe everything that I talked about, I’d rather just share the presentation with you.

Here is the recording of the VMworld presentation. A link to the slides can be found below.

POWERPOINT – Upgrade Your Technical Skills Using a Business Approach by Nick Scuola