Why We Started The Panda Award Show
Ben Climer is an IT professional in the Kansas City area.
Hi, I'm Ben Climer. I’ve been taking things apart and figuring out how they work for as long as I can remember. I built my first computer at age eight, mostly out of necessity after breaking the family one. By twelve, I was coding websites with streaming embedded music. As a teenager, I competed in national contests for web design and computer repair, and discovered early on that I enjoyed solving problems that others found frustrating.
After high school, I started working in IT, eventually spending over a decade in the MSP world. I held a mix of technical and leadership roles, often jumping between fixing urgent issues and planning long-term solutions. That experience shaped how I think about automation today. Automation started as something the MSP I was working for didn’t do, scripting, and turned in a career passion.
I now work at Rewst, where I help others build better workflows and automation. I focus on making tools that are reusable, easy to understand, and built to scale. I'm also involved in community training, internal process improvements, and building things like Schema Doctor to make technical work a little smoother for everyone.
Outside of work, I’m into cars, road trips, and co-hosting my podcast, Panda Award Show.
I live in Kansas City, Kansas, and I still find joy in chasing down bugs/issues that make no sense on paper.
The idea
This idea’s been sitting in the back of my mind for a while now. I’ve wanted to create something for the version of me who was just getting started in IT unsure of where the road might lead, full of questions, and searching for stories that sounded like my own. I’ve always been curious about the journeys people take in this industry. What were the detours? What did they learn the hard way? What advice do they wish they had sooner?
That curiosity is the heartbeat of The Panda Award Show, a new podcast I’m hosting with my friend Abhi Saini. Abhi and I go way back. We worked together on Information Technology Disaster Resource Center (ITDRC) deployments, and when we reconnected at MSPGeekCon—Abhi now an MSP owner, it just felt right. We knew we had to build something together.
The name
You're probably wondering about the name.
As we started tossing around ideas, we knew we wanted a mascot, and both of us liked the idea of a bear. But I had one bear in mind specifically.
Back when I was an intern at my first MSP, we had this tradition of passing around a stuffed panda bear each week. It would go to whoever best embodied the company’s values, including hard work, helpfulness, the kind of stuff you can’t always measure on paper. It was goofy, yeah, but it meant something. It was a symbol of appreciation, of recognition from your peers. That stuck with me.
So we decided to bring the panda back. On this show, we’ll be passing the panda to guests who represent the best of what this industry can be, people who’ve stayed curious, lifted others, and stayed true to their values through the ups and downs of tech careers.
The Panda Award Show is a casual podcast about real people in IT. We talk about the paths taken, the lessons learned, and the things you’d go back and tell your younger self if you could. No polished success stories, just the kind of honest conversations that remind you you’re not alone on the journey.
If you're in tech—or just figuring out what comes next—I hope you’ll listen. You might just find the story you needed to hear.
Where to find it:
Watch for our first episode to drop on July 1st:
