EP 7: Mat X, Organizing community insights for industry growth with MacAdmin tools

Show notes:

In his day job Mat X serves the local film, VFX (visual effects), and media production industries. As an established storage, workflow, and backup expert, he builds better workflows from camera to archive and back again. Working with high-speed fiber channel SAN storage led to a healthy respect for well established backup, archive, and disaster recovery systems, balancing on-premise LTO (linear tape open) systems that offer fast and secure backups with cloud (other people’s data centers).

Many years of managing Macs and other devices has created a large community of IT professionals wanting to do the same. Seeing the new trend of Mac open source software collaboratively written and wanting to focus on the niche of developers (Dev) and IT (Ops) working together, Mat X founded a new conference called MacDevOps:YVR (MDO:YVR for short). In 2015, the first MDO annual conference of IT, system administrators, programmers, and DevOps professionals worldwide took place in Vancouver (YVR). Knowing that more storage and services were moving into the “Cloud” and that writing software collaboratively was a necessary learning goal for many, MDO was created as a way forward to building a better community. Several successful in person conferences later, the pandemic shifted everything online to a greater worldwide audience with speakers and attendees around the globe. Now with the MDO podcast, book club series, and many workshops online throughout the pandemic, the learning never stops. Planning continues for more conferences and community events to train the next generation of IT Pros and seasoned conference speakers.

Topics discussed:

• Mat’s background and how he got into the MacAdmins world
• What a day in the life of Mat X looks like
• Illuminating the biggest changes of MacAdmin over the years
• The creation and journey of MDOYVR
• Why MacAdmins came to be so community-oriented (open source eg. MicroMDM, Nudge, etc)
• What the biggest challenges the industry and MacAdmin teams are
• The future of MacAdmin work

• Learn more about MDOYVR.
• Find Mat on Twitter.
• Find MacDevOpsYVR on Twitter.
• Find Mat on LinkedIn.

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