My journey to the cloud - Achieved one major milestone

I am happy, excited and honored to be selected as a VMware  vExpert for the year 2015.  

This is a major milestone and confirmation on my path to the cloud.

The vExpert Program

The title vExpert is a little bit misleading because, it is not a certification that validates a person’s technical expertise but on how much a person contributes to the VMware community.  This blog has a good description on the VMware vExpert program. Basically vExpert has 3 tracks:

• Customer
• Partner
•  Evangelist

I applied for the evangelist track.

My journey to the cloud

In 2008, the word “virtualization” is only a buzz word for me.  In May 2008, I saw an Email from Interop saying the first 100 person that reply to that Email will get a free conference pass to Interop.  Working on a networking company, I had attended Interop many times but only for the expo when I roam around the different vendor booth lurking for free t-shirts.  To my surprise I did get a conference pass. The company that I work for is not doing too well and they will not pay for my travel and lounging expenses.  Well I figure for less than $500, I can attend Interop with a full conference pass is a really good deal.  So I paid for the expenses from my own pocket and went.

This conference turns out to be my life changing event.  I picked the virtualization track and in 5 days, I learned a lot about virtualization.  I saw that virtualization would be the future. 

After Interop I started to make myself read different articles, blogs and whitepapers that I came across every day.  I build for myself a home lab to play around with different technologies.  With this I became a generalist.  I can talk about security, DevOps, Configuration Management Tools, virtualization, networking, SDN/NFV, container … etc and also my other favorite subject – beer.  But then what can I do with all these things that I learn everyday? I need to translate what I know into something that can help my employer to make money.  What can I offer?  What kind of problem can I solve for my boss?

In the technology world, one should go very broad or go very deep.  I find that going broad is not an easy route to walk. 

If you look at the title and description of this blog, you will see that I am trying to find a job in the cloud technology that I can land myself in so that my day job will be cloud related.  Again, being a generalist, what can I do?  What can I offer to my employer? I like being a Technology Evangelist or Technical Marketing Engineer.  I would also like to be a solution architect but I will need way more real life/ production level design experience.

I find that I have a passion on technology as well as a passion to pass along what I have learned everyday to others so that we can all move forward in the IT industry. 

Looking ahead in 2015

Well, I know this is already February (42 days already passed by in 2015) but this is my plan for 2015 being a VMware vExpert.  I am going to serve the community by sharing what I learn in this blog and I will be looking for speaking opportunities in difference conferences and/or local user group. At local meetups I often encourage others to participate more and to share what they know.  I made a slogan: I know some and you know some. Let's share what we know.

I am also active on Twitter (my handle is @vCloudernBeer) and I will be twitting and re-twitting different technology related topics.

On the career side, my goal this year is to pass the VCIX-NV (VMware Certified Implementation Expert – Network Virtualization) exam.  My ultimate goal is to be able to become a VCDX-NV (VMware Certified Design Expert — Network Virtualization )