On Monday, September 4th, I did my first podcast interview. The podcast was the Tech Interviews with Paul Stringfellow, a fellow NetApp A-Teamer. If you never had the pleasure of listening to Paul’s podcast or met him firsthand, you may not know that he is one charming guy. Seriously, he’s “Hugh Grant” charming.
The topic of my podcast interview was “Thoughts on VMworld 2017”. Pre-interview, I went through and captured some of the topics that I wanted to touch on about my experience at VMworld. I’m pretty introverted, so I thought that prepping some would help me to feel less awkward. Because it was my first time on a podcast, I’ll cut myself some slack and tell that negative voice in my head to “hush.”
Paul usually interviews seasoned IT professionals and experienced podcast guests. This time he talked to me, a total podcast and VMworld attendee newbie. I’ve been trying pretty hard to get out of my comfort zone and become more involved in the Tech Community. Paul’s podcast was the perfect opportunity to meet both of those objectives.
Here are some additional thoughts that I had about VMworld that I failed to express:
Happy for Homework
One of the best things about attending a conference is leaving with a slew of topics that don’t know that much about and can’t wait to learn more about. It was way too easy to stay in your little tech bubble. OpenStack, NFV, SolidFire, coding with APIs are at the top of my homework list.
HCI and Software-Defined Storage Will Reign Supreme
VMworld had lots of HCI and Software-Defined Storage talk. That is not surprising. However, during a Software-Defined storage session that I attended, they predicted that 50% of existing storage would be software-defined storage; 30% will be hyper-converged by 2019. Wow!
Tech Field Day for the World!
I had the incredible opportunity to be a delegate at Stephen Foskett’s Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld. Stephen is the Kevin Bacon of the Tech World. He knows everybody! It was an incredible honor to be surrounded by some serious Tech Community Rockstars. I also had the good fortune of seeing Samsung, Druva, and NetApp’s presentations in real-time with the opportunity to ask any questions.
Overall, VMworld was an amazing experience for me. I had many opportunities to get out of my comfort zone. Post-VMworld, my next step is to start building a business case for why I should attend again next year. You can find more about VMworld experience, by checking out my Google photo album.
Link to my VMworld 2017 photo album.