My name is Brett Slaski. I am an accomplished IT professional who has spent a lot of time working with computers and the people and technologies which surround them. I currently work as a support manager for The Corporate Executive Board Company (the most stodgy name ever), but this blog, its content and opinions are my own. I do not speak on behalf of CEB in any way. I blog about things I feel like writing about. I don’t seem to finish as many articles as I start and others it’s probably best are never published. I would love to be involved in a company where I made a difference again and shared in the pains and rewards.

In my own time I play with my two sons, drive my wife insane and try to enjoy whatever I can. I am at times an avid PC gamer and always spend more hours with a computer than I need to. Minecraft is a pretty hot thing in our house right now and my oldest son and I have spent a good amount of time building mods for it (Stonecraft and Grack). In 2014 I have volunteered with the group of That Conference to help organize and run the “Summer camp for geeks.” what a great group of people organizing a really great tech conference.

I love the newest and latest technology but am often too shy to shell out the money early. I’ll play with yours all day if you bring it by though! I fell in love with ASP.NET MVC at release candiate 3 and never looked back.  Though I have never been a UI guy persay, it just made sence to me.  I have also been having fun with Web-API as well.  I am sick, I know.

I have finally broken my habit of bring home every old piece of hardware I can get my hands on. The old servers just don’t do it for me anymore and I tire of them sitting around in my shop [garage] and greatly increasing my electric bill. Thank you CEB for providing me with a Premium MSDN subscription. Along with this subscription comes $100 of WindowsAzure credits, monthly. Go take a look, if you have an MSDN subscription, you will have some level of credits as well.

WindowsAzure has been a great way to stand up all different types of operating systems.  I even setup an Ubuntu Minecraft server for the boys and I for a short time! Though I sometimes do miss the spinning metal and excess shop noise.  There is just something about digging around in cases, getting dirty and busting up knuckles…

I have become more of a hobby programmer. I programmed professionally for many years, but then went into management for more money. I sure miss programming and often think about going back into it, though finding someone to pay me is a different story.

One language I have been having a lot of fun with recently is Erlang. For years I wanted to learn a functional programming language and ended up with Erlang. I am pretty sure it was Fred Hérbert’s book, “Learn You Some Erlang for Great Good” which sold me. It is available free at http://learnyousomeerlang.com/, which is where I started in to it. After the first chapter I decided to buy the book and have been pecking away at it ever since.

Why IT Slug? This comes from a past time in my life when I ran a one-man it shop for a small (50) person company in Downtown Chicago. I literally did everything IT, plus a lot of other business functions along the way. I may even be able to still run a payroll, who knows. I probably learned more in my nine years there than in any other company to date.

What is: “It doesn’t get any busier, just more new stuff doesn’t get done.” It sounds kind of negative? It isn’t meant to be negative, it is just the way it feels in the depths of corporate life at times. Less people, less resources and more work; you can’t be any busier, as your working full-bore as it is, so more stuff doesn’t get done.