Dave Klatka
Where’d you get your start? Tell me about yourself.
The origin story – how’d you land in the industry, and how’d you find your way to MSP Geek?
I’ve been in the MSP world for about 15 years, and somewhere along the way I discovered that I really enjoy automation. I’ve spent roughly 12 years working on ways to make IT work smarter, whether that’s eliminating repetitive tasks, building tools to solve problems, or finding ways to make life a little easier for the people supporting the technology. These days, I work as an automation engineer, primarily with PowerShell, C#, and .NET. I like taking something tedious or error-prone and figuring out how to make it happen automatically. I’m a big believer that if you find yourself doing the same thing over and over, there’s probably an opportunity to automate it. I’ve also found that the MSP community is full of people willing to share what they know, help each other troubleshoot, and occasionally save someone from spending an entire afternoon reinventing the wheel.
2. What channels do you hang out in?
Which Discord/Slack/Forums channels are you most likely to be lurking in or posting.
I spend most of my time in #MSP-General, #v-ninjaone, #mspgeekcon, and #automation. I also keep an eye on #security and #patching because they’re great places to catch early warnings about vulnerabilities and patches that need attention.
3. What are three channels you wish MSP Geek had?
Get creative – this one’s supposed to be a little funny. No wrong answers.
#tech-shenanigans, a safe space for members to share their shenanigans. #it-worked-in-testing, a safe space to share the things that worked perfectly in the lab and immediately caught fire in production. Bonus points for screenshots. And #can-this-be-automated, where members post their most repetitive, soul-crushing tasks and everyone brainstorms ways to make the computer do the work instead. That last one would probably be my favorite, although it might just give me even more ideas for projects I don’t have time to finish!
4. What was your first post?
Take us back – what did you post (or reply to) the first time you showed up in the community?
“the problem with my probe push issue. is /16 (65,534 possible address) will the probe even make it through all addresses.” I had to dig through Slack to find this one, and honestly, it doesn’t feel like it could have been my first post, but I couldn’t find anything older. It was back in September 2016, and I was commenting on one of the restrictions the CW Automate network probe deployment has for a /16 network.
5. What advice would you give to a Goots who just joined?
The thing you wish someone had told you on day one.
Don’t be afraid to ask questions. There’s a good chance someone else has run into the exact same problem, and even if they haven’t, talking it through with other people can help you see things differently. You don’t have to be an expert before you contribute, either. Share what you’ve learned, post the solution when you figure something out, and don’t underestimate how helpful your experience can be to someone else. And when you finally solve that weird problem after four hours of troubleshooting, post the solution! Future-you might forget how you fixed it, and the next person who runs into it will appreciate you saving them those four hours.
6. What’s one thing you could “geek out” about for hours?
Technical, hobby, random obsession – whatever it is, this is your soapbox.
Automation, without a doubt. I can spend an unreasonable amount of time figuring out how to turn a manual process into something reliable, repeatable, and preferably invisible to the person who has to use it. I especially enjoy PowerShell and building tools that solve real-world MSP problems. There’s something satisfying about taking a process that used to require a bunch of manual steps and turning it into a script that handles everything consistently. The dangerous part is that once you start automating things, you start looking at everything and thinking, “I bet I could automate that.” It’s a blessing and a curse, mostly for my ever-growing backlog of personal projects.
