The VMware side of the community (note from VMworld EU 2017)
During this my second VMworld EU participation I dedicated a lot of time meeting people and sharing ideas and contents with other friends. I think, this is the key to increase the knowledge and stay tuned in what is happening in world… and big events like VMworld offer more and more community moments that represent best part of every show.
Focusing on VMware communities, I could say that an important part of our skill sets comes from our community involvement: forums, chats, events, blog reading and posting are a good starting point to let know that <<there are news or you could do more with your infrastructure !>>. To enforce the boundaries with community guys, VMware spends a lot of time and energy making the community a better place every day. And, sure, this is a fantastic thing! Let me introduce these environments seen from my perspective.
VMTN
All starts here: the first point of contact for every community member, VMware employee included, is a platform that now counts about 3.4 million people involved in many activities, like playing Cloud Credibility, post or answer questions in the forum or blog, contribute to {code}… and also there’s a link with VMware Users Groups.
Check and register here: https://communities.vmware.com/welcome
The forum is the common plaza for everyone: the asynchronous way to discuss about technology, issues and initiatives that come from personal experiences and curiosities found around the globe. And this is only the beginning! because VMTN portal represent a true digital workspace to share documents or post and stay tuned with initiatives, news, events and funnies.
Behind the scenes there is a huge commitment from VMware management to invest money and energy place and initiatives and let the people know what’s going on and feel well to share and discuss around VMware technologies: a real showcase for the community. Many people involved in the community are now true legends in the cyberspace, and VMware is proud to awards them with “Community Warrior” recognition!
Cloud Credibility
The gaming part of the community is Cloud Credibility. I started playing in 2013 and I wrote some posts about this funniest part of the community where learning and win is the way to start playing with technology and light up the newbie street to improve their self.
But this is the same place for veterans and expert which are contributing playing and writing tasks. Since I’m an old player I noticed a huge growing of this platform starting from few tasks and now it counts more than 50 badges and close to 5000 tasks!
Prizes IMHO are only the incentive to play, and there are some collected swag which I proudly show in some network occasions!
But there are also more cool prizes like GoPro, LEGO, headsets that could be won during challenges in big events like VMworld, Virtual Events or simply weekly challenges… Of course, I’m a player! not so good as my friends Andrew Mauro and Andy Nash but when I find a couple of minutes I’m really happy to do some tasks and increase my score! Believe me sign here https://www.cloudcredibility.com, choose a team and enjoy!
Around CloudCred, my most awaiting moment of the year is the meeting (and the photo) with CloudCred veteran players at the vExpert party! This year it happened again:
Thank you friends! We rock!
BlogBeat and {code}
The news coming from the last VMworld US 2017 is BlogBeat: a program that let all bloggers share their posts in a big stream. I think that Elsa Mayer, the BlogBeat manager is doing a great job, involving all the bloggers to let them know what are writing the other and so on. I leave this argument with Elsa’s video who best introduces the programs and the opportunities:
Check BlogBeat here: https://blogs.vmware.com
Talking about {code} I could say only a word: Fantastic! Probably I feel good with this part of community, because in my previous job a was a software developer… and like happens in ex-developer life: << You’ll never forget… and sometimes you’ll get into the code again, even if your job is changed!>>. I think that this side of the community started from the idea of some VMware guys like Alan Renouf and William Lam, to share what the creativity side of VMware community is able to do… solving problems and make improvements. I think this could represent for VMware one of the best resource to develop the future products: in fact there is a lot participation to VMware GitHub projects (https://github.com/vmware) and there is a slack channel that is heavy utilized by about 4K people. If you want to subscribe, simply register here: https://code.vmware.com/web/code/join/.
Surfing the official site https://code.vmware.com/ you’ll find all the needs to implement VMware API products, resources, certifications, flings and news and events around the “dev” side of VMware.
Focusing on VMworld, the most acclaimed moment for “dev inside” people like me is the VMworld Hackathon! For the second year, in both VMworld US and EU, VMware {code} has organized an event where VMworld Dev (and not only) participant could express themself, playing with code and hacking the in vSphere environment! In few words: some people around a table will break the code (or create something new) to improve it or let it do something different! Obviously it’s a nerdy stuff… but the funniest part is build a team where the newbie could learn a lot of lessons from experts and contribute to the reach the final result. And because those people are unknown before sitting in the table, or don’t have ever worked together, they should organize task and whatever to reach the objective. In other words, they do a team building experience. (Why the software houses don’t hire using this method?)
This is my winning year, and I started explaining what we’ve done in the team https://blog.linoproject.net/the-need-for-code-vmworldeu-hackathon-2017-notes-part-1/. The second part of this post is under revision before the release… please be patient!
Final notes!
During these two VMworld I was proud to meet VMware people who are in the first line with the community: they explained me a lot of things and I growed my knowledge following their suggestions and living every day in this platform. I want to share this message is: enter in VMTN, have fun with CloudCredibility, be involved in the community and be recognized as vExpert, then spread the voice with BlogBeat and {code} to improve the system!
Finally I just want to say a big thanks to VMware staff (absolutely not in order and ex-included): Noell Grier, Katie Bradley, Eric Nielsen, Corey Romero, Elsa Mayer, Julia Kalus, Tim Bonnnemann (Hope I don’t forgot anyone). Let’s see at next VMworld I hope as a blogger again or simply as a person who is learning a lot in the house that all of you have built for the community!