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Interview with Trevor Pott (@cakeis_not_alie), Writer for The Register and Sysadmin Extraordinaire

January 4, 2013

By @Rose_at_O, @Olivia_at_O

Trevor Pott - eGeek - The Register - sysadmin

Trevor Pott is a systems administrator, consultant and a blogger and writer for The Register, SearchVMware.Techtarget.com and Petri.Co.Il. He also operates an IT consultancy in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada called eGeek Consulting. Check out articles Trevor has written for The Register here. His personal blog is here, and the blog for his company, eGeek Consulting, is here.

Q.  Tell us a bit about yourself: 

Egads!  The trap question, right up front!  I am a systems administrator by trade, but have spent the past five years working in CTO-like roles as a consultant. I am a business owner – my consulting work having expanded to the point that it requires some other bodies – as well as a technology blogger with pretentions of real journalism.

I’ve tried to answer “who are you and what do you do” in so many ways over the past year that I have settled on simply calling myself a nerd – it says so on my LinkedIn profile – and letting readers and potential clients place me in whatever box they feel is requisite.  I have earned a reputation for thinking orthogonally. I am always interested in the specifics of a given deployment or problem, not writing everything off into these easily classifiable boxes and applying pre-canned solutions or judgments.

My customers pay me to think – to come up with solutions to problems – not to simply implement the same thing everyone else is implementing.  It is by doing things differently – hopefully more efficiently and tightly streamlined to existing workflows – that my customers differentiate themselves from their competition.

Given the above is my day job, when I write for various online publications, I tend to look at things from angles that the average techie doesn’t. I am more willing to consider alternative vendors and solutions, if their value can be proven.

Q. Tell us a little bit about the titles you write for and their interest in virtualization. 

The Register currently provides the bulk of my publishing bandwidth.  In general they prefer to hear about news; the more sensational the better.  They like market disruptors and scandals; things that attract a lot of eyeballs.  They have a massive audience – officially audited in 2011 as being 6.6 million, and well beyond that now – so the tastes among the readership are diverse.  El Reg keeps me around mostly to stir the pot and keep things interesting. It is my job to inject some reviews and interviews with interesting people at the coalface and talk about the practical aspects of implementing technologies in all sorts of different scenarios.

Petri.Co.Il likes “how to” articles.  Their business model is completely different from The Register Read the rest of this entry ?