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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.

I can tell from the ever-increasing urgency of emails from the events team that VMworld 2021 is just around the corner!

Virtual conference event fatigue is real. I have attended and presented at many since the pandemic began, with varying levels of engagement. As an introvert, I can’t quite believe I’m saying this, but I can’t wait to get pack to meeting up with people in the real world!

The value of a conference is super-charged by the mix of dedicated time, networking opportunities and quality live content. Unfortunately for me a virtual conference tends to be diluted by distractions on-screen (and off) and is missing the key ingredient of those haphazard incidental meetups in the conference center. And whether you prefer on-demand pre-recorded content or not, for me it loses some of it’s appeal when you know the mistakes are edited out. And yes, I edit out my mistakes.

Where can you find me at VMworld 2020

VMworld 2020 is fast approaching (Sept 29th-October 1st), and in case you hadn’t heard, it online and free! If you struggle getting funding for tickets and flights normally, this could be a golden opportunity to get involved! Register for VMworld 2020 for FREE here! Please come and talk to me for my round table session, it will be awkward by myself!

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.

TL;DR - the first 50 vExperts to sign up on this google sheet and then make a donation to my fundraiser here or another charity of your choice will get a nice shiny new vExpert 2020 sticker!

A few weeks ago, I entered a StickerMule tweet contest to get some free holographic sticker prints - and I won! While I was thinking about what to do with my newly donated sticker trove, I figured why not use it to bribe the vExpert community in exchange for some charitable giving?! And, given there were over 50 likes and 40 comments in response to my initial tweet, it seemed like vExperts were up for a little bit of paying it forward!

I’ve posted previously about moving to Hugo as a publishing platform for this blog , this post is a bit more about how I’m managing the publishing using GitLab’s CI/CD Pipelines.

Firstly, I need to mention that I’m using three different repositories for my code base, and why. The three repositories are:

• definit-hugo - this contains the hugo site configuration
• definit-content - this contains the site content - markdown files, images etc
• definit-theme - this contains the VMware Clarity-based theme I use for my site

definit-content and definit-theme are git submodules in the definit-hugo project, mapped into the /content and /themes folders respectively. This allows me to keep the configuration, content and theme separate, and to manage them as separate entities. The aim is that the theme will eventually be in a position to be released, and I don’t want to have to extract it from my hugo code base later on.

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.

Autumn seems to be a time for the winds of change to blow through our industry, and this year that’s true for me.

TL;DR - I’m leaving VMware PSO to join the Cloud Management Business Unit as a Technical Marketing Manager for Cloud Automation!

It’s been a little over two years since I joined VMware as a Senior Conusltant in the EMEA NSX Practice, and in that time I’ve enjoyed some great opportunities, worked with some great people and technologies. And I’ve learned a lot since taking on my first NSX-T design just days after joining. But, as I mentioned when I joined a couple of years ago , I’ve always said NSX comes alive when it’s automated by vRA. In fact, almost every engagement I’ve done over the past two years has had a strong vein of automation running through it.

When I started my blog back in May 2007 (12 years ago!) I was running Wordpress, then switched to DotNetNuke, then BlogEngine, then finally back to Wordpress - which I’ve used since 2010. Today I’ve cut over to a new architecture based on Hugo and hosted on AWS using a combination of Route53, Cloudfront and S3.

Why the change? If it ain’t broke…

You may well ask why I’ve made the move, or you may not…I’m going to tell you anyway…