MacTech Conference November 6, 2013 at 9:59 pm

MacTech Conference 2013 (Day 1)

MacTech 2013 kicked off today at the Manhatten Beach Marriot in Los Angeles, CA. The first joint session started with a few announcements regarding MacTech Bootcamp III which is coming in 2014 with all new curriculum and taking place in 9 cities. Also announced were the dates for MacTech 2014, which will start pre-conference sessions on November 4th followed by the main conference from November 5th-7th. Th keynote by Jacqui Cheng of Ars Technica followed the announcements. Jacqui briefly discussed Apple’s history and how Steve Jobs approached technology differently than any other person in the tech community. Jacquie distilled some practical values from how Steve approached the world including empowering people via technology, being forward thinking with business strategies and making sure that the work is quality. The keynote was a great reminder of how we ended up with such world changing products such as the iPhone, iPad and modern Macs. The first session in the IT track was the yearly “State of Mac IT” talk. Charles Edge delivered the talk this year and discussed where we have arrived in regards to OS X Server, Storage and Imaging. Charles also discussed the phenomenon of people moving from retail jobs (Such as Apple Store Geniuses) into more traditional IT organizations and the impacts they have been having. One such impact is bringing the genius bar system into the enterprise and changing the structure of the IT organization as a result. Charles also reflected on his talk “Who moved my cheese?” from a previous year and updated some of the main points from that talk as far as where we are now and where we may be in the future. Charles did a great job covering various strategies that may work going forward regarding career choices and how we can impact the industry. After lunch, Michael Lynn (@mikeymikey on twitter, frogor in ##osx-server on irc.freenode.net) had an excellent session on troubleshooting. Mike covered why it is critical to have a toolbox of troubleshooting skills, especially now that Apple is on a yearly OS release cycle. Mike went over some useful tips for using Console, Activity Monitor, Safe Mode and apps such as fseventer and opensnoop. Mike highlighted that it is necessary to know how to thoroughly troubleshoot issues on OS X in order to better serve your customers and future proof yourself as the OS changes and issues arise. MacTech 2013 is off to a great start with many sessions yet to come over the next two days.

Nate Walck

Nate is a Systems Reliability Engineer at Dropbox, Inc in San Francisco, CA. He runs afp548.com along with Sam Keeley and is one of the founding members of the ##osx-server IRC channel on freenode.net. He loves being involved in the Mac Admin community and using Open Source projects whenever possible, especially Munki, The Luggage and Puppet.

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