Career

Well… it’s been a while.

I looked back and realised the last time I posted here was July 2022—almost three years ago! It’s hard to believe how quickly that time has flown. Consider this post a signal of intent: I’m planning to start publishing content here once again.

So, why did I stop?

It’s a fair question. The truth is, I didn’t stop creating content—I just stopped publishing it here.

It’s hard to believe that my first VMworld was almost 9 years ago! I feel very blessed to have attended in 2014 (EU) , 2015 (EU) , 2016 (US) , 2017 (EU) , 2018 (my first as an employee), 2019 (my first time as a speaker!), and virtually in 2020 and 2021.

Over the years VMworld has been hugely formative in my career, I’ve talked many times before about how the trajectory of my career really took off when I got involved with the London VMUG, and how that led to being awarded vExpert in 2013. Through the vExpert programme, I got my first blogger pass for VMworld, and from there the networking opportunities led to certification, career advances, and ultimately making the contacts (and friends) that got me in the door at VMware. It’s hard to overstate how much VMworld has helped over the years.

I am blessed to be working for a great employer, and while COVID had a significant impact everywhere, from a work point of view, I have never been busier.

Because we are growing as an organisation, opportunities are surfacing on a regular basis.

My focus in the last 24 months has shifted from a more project to project focus to now being involved in several projects at once providing project and architectural governance as well as normal consultant duties. This has been challenging but really enjoyable. This means often I am not in the technical “weeds”, and exercising new skills and leaning on past experience.

Having not sat any VMware exams recently (MSC exam not including) I had to update my VMware certification status and therefore sit the VCP exam.

The VCP-DCV 2021 certification validates candidate skills to implement, manage, and troubleshoot a vSphere infrastructure, using best practices to provide a powerful, flexible, and secure foundation for business agility that can accelerate the transformation to cloud computing.

Being a Consultant within a VMware Principal Partner there are standards we need to meet and preferably exceed.

Master Services Competencies (MSCs) are VMware partner designations designed to recognize services-capable partners with delivery expertise and experience within a VMware solution area.

With that in mind I sat the VCF Specialist exam.

The Exam

The exam covers a broad spectrum of VMware technologies (vSphere, NSX-T, vSAN, Tanzu) I was apprehensive about it as there is an awful lot of material to cover that the exam expects you to have good knowledge of. You have 130 minutes to work through 72 question It is available as a remote-proctored exam, and requires a score of 300 or more to pass.

In the most recent round of vExpert sub-program applications, I was asked to help review applications for the vExpert Cloud Management track. As part of the CMBU and a long-standing vExpert it made sense for me to help out, and I was happy to do so. I reviewed ~60 of the applications that were in my area - automation. The experience was an eye-opener. What follows is a distillation of what (not) to do when you’re writing your application.

Since I started learning Kubernetes the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) exam has been a target for me, but it’s always seemed to be out of reach. The whole Kubernetes ecosystem is a vast and nebulous beast, with new projects rising to the fore all the time, and old projects fading from favour. The size and rapid development that make the field so interesting and powerful, are the same properties that make the learning curve so steep, and the entry bar so high.

I’ve had the Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist exam booked for a long time - so long in fact that the exam voucher was due to expire at the end of January 2022! I figured I’d give it a go right at the start of January, work out how far off the mark I was and then aim to do the free retake before it expired at the end of the month.

So it being 2020 now I thought it would be a pleasant exercise to quickly glance over the previous ten years and reflect a little. Before I even begin I will say I have never been happier in my career and work/life balance (which is always an on going effort to keep appropriate)

I am going to break it down in a yearly format and then summarize at the end.