I’m writing this post on June 23, 2015, from a hotel in Boston. On June 23, 2014, I walked into building 9 on the Cisco campus in San Jose, taking my first job in almost 20 years with no hands-on sysadmin responsibilities. I’ll admit, it was terrifying in a way.

Tell me more, tell me more…

I had just come home a month earlier from Cisco Live 2014 in San Francisco. When I got on the train to go home that Thursday afternoon in May, I couldn’t have told you that it would be my last sponsored visit with Tech Field Day, or my last trade show as a regular customer. But when I woke up the next morning to a voicemail from my soon-to-be manager at Cisco, I made the decision promptly and prepared to hang up my oncall pager.

In the year between last June 23 and this June 23, I seem to have built a personal brand as a big data safari tour guide, complete with the safari hat you see in my profiles around the Internet. I’ve presented to internal sales engineering teams, my VP’s leadership team, partners and customers, vendor theatre audiences at Strata+Hadoop World and Cisco Live, as well as keynoting three Big Data Everywhere events. And in the highest honor so far, I was chosen to give a breakout session at Cisco Live earlier this month in San Diego.

I’ve brought context, proportion, and no small amount of humor to the topic of big data at Cisco, as well as sharing my experience with systems management and real-world Cisco UCS deployment, and while I’ve still got work to do, it’s gone fairly well so far. I’ve had customers say “oh, I’ve read your blog, we’d like to talk to you” and “if you’ve got the hat with you, could you put it on?” I’ve been told that VPs are noticing what I do in a positive sense. And once again I’m pretty well known for my coffee addiction as well.

There have been a couple of downsides… seeing as I’ve gone over the dark side (and still can’t find the cookies), I can’t be a Tech Field Day delegate anymore. I also lost Cisco Champion (although I’m still a Champion Emeritus and a supporter of the program whenever I can be) and PernixPro (for reasons I’m not 100% sure of) status. And of course, the free Disney parks admissions went away very quickly. But the benefits of the change definitely outweigh the downsides; I still get invited to the TFD parties, and I can buy my park hopper passes when I need them.

So where do we go from here?

When this trip is done, I’ll be home for about two months, and will be focusing on some of the more hands-on technical stuff I’ve postponed, with the help of a couple of spare electrical circuits for my home lab. I have a couple of speaking engagements likely on the horizon, and probably some booth babe duty as well.

I’ll also be catching up on my Interop coverage from last month… I feel bad about neglecting a couple of those interviews but a couple of work obligations came up and ate most of May. I still have that citizen-analyst role to play from time to time, even though I don’t have mouse ears to take off to play that role anymore.

But for now, I want to thank everyone who’s made this year of incredible growth possible, from the bosses who (perhaps unintentionally) convinced me to prove that my message had an audience, to friends at Cisco who convinced me that there might be a place for me here, to the leaders and colleagues and partners who continue to remind me regularly that what I have to say matters and helps people both inside and outside Cisco.

I’ll leave you with what was an unexpected cap on the end of year one… I gave my “What could possibly go wrong? Tales from the Trenches of Big Data” talk a third time at Big Data Everywhere in Boston this morning. A reporter from CRN, the channel marketing website, was in the front row taping and taking notes… and my “plan for failure” message resonated enough to get mentioned on CRN today.

I may not be a vice president, but I’m still doing work I love, with people I admire and respect (and who often reciprocate), and who knows, I may end up in your neighborhood soon using 20th century pop lyrics and terrible puns to make sense of big data. See you real soon….