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It has been a few years since I read (and lost) a great article on career progression and personal insight. That article helped me relax into who I am from a professional point of view, but it also challenged me.

I have been in IT for over 20 years now and in truth the first 10 years were not so great (perhaps a story for another time) but it was when I stumbled upon the vCommunity by way of Twitter and then subsequently I attended my first VMUG (in London) which completely challenged and changed my way of thinking and approach to my career. Talking to and observing peers whom I respected gave me a lot of inspiration to re-evaluate what I was doing in my career, why I did what I was doing and perhaps most importantly of all was I really being the best I can be?

I recently started looking into ways of monitoring the temperature and humidity in my garage - for two reasons. Firstly, I have my lab workload cluster out there in the form of a Dell C6100, and I’ve noticed with the recent weather that the temperature in there gets…a bit warm. Secondly, I like to brew beer at home, and one of the keys to a good brew is consistent temperature!

A couple of days ago I saw a tweet from Cody De Arkland showing his new tweaked VMware Clarity based theme on his website.

Staying up until 3am to get the brisket on, so what do I do? Work on tuning up https://t.co/YDiFkGIKLY with some better @VMwareClarity styling! Check out the differences below! Subtle changes but I think it's a lot better. Thoughts? pic.twitter.com/6sYnuBahwI

— Cody De Arkland (@Codydearkland) June 17, 2018

Cody has gone down the route of using Hugo and AWS, which I respect, but just seems like too much work for me at the moment! I am familiar with WordPress, and Simon is barely computer literate at the best of times, so I can’t ask him to start writing in markdown. But I did want some of this Clarity goodness - so I set about learning how to create a WordPress theme, and how to integrate Clarity with this.

So…this is a frustrated sort of post. As you are most likely to already know, the new data protection laws (GDPR) are coming into effect on the 25th May 2018. I must emphasise that I am not an expert on GDPR, this post is my layman’s conclusion for my specific circumstances. I run this blog as an exercise to help others, provide information and as a hobby. There is a lot of speculation around how this will affect bloggers, and a lot of panic and mis-information too. I’ve seen a few people this week simply shut down and delete their blogs - which is both upsetting and sad.

Upon seeing others in the wider community making a blog post like this as a marker in the sand I thought I would follow suit as a way to see what I have learned and goals I would like to achieve in the coming year. 2017 was a good year and a very busy one at that, I got to see a lot of new places on my work travels and met some really amazing, clever and talented people.

Last Tuesday I had the privilege of presenting an introduction to the NSX APIs on vBrownBag EMEA - you can view the recording below or on vBrownBag’s youtube channel.

During the presentation I showed a mind map of the API, which I’ve made

available on GitHub in PDF format

I’ve also published the Postman collection and environment I used during the demonstration, which covers some basic configuration and deploy tasks:

This was as I expected, the busiest day sessions wise for me. There was so much good stuff I had to be a little ruthless on what I wanted and or needed to attend while also wanting to get into the solutions exchange.

Also at the end of the day the customer appreciate party was scheduled so that was something I was looking forward to a great deal (Hint - Kaiser Chiefs)

Transforming Networking and Security for the Digital Era

Wednesday morning I attended the Network and Security keynote which, if I’m honest, I found to be a bit boring. To be fair, it was probably aimed at business leaders and maybe not those that are technical. There were three customer stories, but I would have liked to have heard much more about the problems that NSX solved for them specifically, rather than being datacenter transformation/cloud journey stories that included NSX. For me, it felt like there was nothing new in the presentation that hadn’t been covered in the general sessions. I would have liked to have seen and heard a bit more what the NSBU’s leadership think is going to be big over the next 5 years.

I was honoured to be asked to be part of VMware’s CrowdChat for the general sessions this year, the idea being to live-tweet the General Session as it progressed. I’ve tried to embed the session from CrowdChat itself below, but it might be blocked by your browser for running unsafe scripts. You can also see the commentary on the Day Two General Session here .

[http://www.via-cc.at/657sc]

I managed to dodge the rainstorms in the morning before arriving, the hotel being just across the road from the Venue was a huge help (Thank you Xtravirt )

The main session was great particularly HCX announcement and the VR admin demo.

I then hit the solutions exchange as soon as it opened. There are all the usual suspects there -except- Cisco (anyone know why?)

It was also great to see the guys from Blue Medora .