VirtualMachinery

I wrote a blog post a few weeks ago explaining how I had updated the way my website got published, using a CI Pipeline. I hilariously (at the time) announced that 2020 was the Year of CI, not VDI. Since that time, things have changed. A lot. I’ve spent the best part of four weeks at home along with most of the rest of the world as we all take shelter from the COVID-19 epidemic sweeping the globe.

I was fortunate enough to attend the 2020 VMUG Leader Summit at the VMware HQ in Palo Alto last week. It’s not the first one that I’ve been to and as a member of the VMUG Board of Directors (BoD), my attendance is positively encouraged, which is great. The Leader Summit is an opportunity for leaders from many different local VMUG chapters to get together for a couple of days of as much networking, event planning, tip swapping and absorbing VMware information as we can collectively handle.

There’s a lot of things that I’d like to know more about, do more with or just see if I like! Equally, there’s only a certain amount of those that I can realistically achieve or focus upon in any given time. This is a quick list of some of the things that I am looking at or want to look at and why. No doubt it will change over the course of the year, but I just figured that it’d be interesting to look back at the end of this year to see how I get on.

As I flew back from the VMUG Leader Summit in December 2017, I resolved to serve on the VMUG Board of Directors (BoD) before I was done with VMUG. I didn’t tell anyone, but somehow, word got out… History I’d been a VMUG Leader for a couple of years when VMUG came calling and asked me if I would join a newly founded Leader Advisory Council, which was designed to sit between the Board of Directors and the wider body of Leaders to help with the flow of ideas and opinions between both parties.

When I last had a serious update of this site it was 2017 and I had decided to go all trendy, with my static site generator and my S3 hosted website. But I didn’t really finish the job, so this time, whilst revisiting my blog as part of a Level 4 Toastmasters project to write eight blog posts in a month, it was time to close the Circle(CI). Haha! Yes, these February 2020 blog posts are more intertwined than one might first think.

Background Once I had discovered London VMUG but before I became a VMUG Leader, I used to attend the UK VMUG UserCon (UKVMUG) as a delegate, because it was way easier to sell my boss on me attending a day and a half at UKVMUG at the Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham than it was to ask to attend VMworld in Barcelona for a week. It helps that attending a UserCon is free!

The first London VMUG meeting of 2020 was held at our usual location, TechUK, on Thursday 30th January and I’d been looking forward to it for quite a while. Sadly, I didn’t make it all the way through the day, as I came down with some form of plague, which took a few days to fully shake off! I don’t think I looked very welcoming and I’m also sure that the rest of the leaders didn’t really want me hanging around, so I was ‘encouraged’ to go home early.

You might have already guessed this, but it was VMUG who put me on to Toastmasters. When VMUG announced that they’d secured a bunch of Toastmasters memberships for members who wanted to improve their speaking skills, I figured that I had nothing to lose. I’d spoken at VMUGs previously and I was a VMUG Leader, soon to join the Board of Directors, so it made sense to me to take steps to improve my oratory skills.

Well, I’m back. Just when you thought it was safe… Has it really been that long? Wow! Leave a few draft blog posts hanging around to be published ‘as soon as I tidy this up’ and sometimes you just never get back to finishing them off. It’s easily done. A lot has happened since the previous post, which advertised the 2017 UK VMUG UserCon. A lot of it has been VMUG related too, one way or another.

What is it? 2017’s UK VMUG UserCon takes place on Thursday 16th November at the National Conference Centre (a.k.a the National Motorcycle Museum) which is between Birmingham and Coventry. For those of you that don’t know, this is an all day, multi-track, mini VMworld kind of event - but with a higher ratio of great community content. Win, win huh? Oh, and it’s free! Where is it? For you SatNav users, the address is Coventry Road, Bickenhill, Solihull, West Midlands, B92 0EJ