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Sep
13thChange of pace : My next career experiment
Every year I get a little older and a little wiser. And the one thing I am realizing about myself is that I thrive on challenges. My natural element is breaking problems down and creating answers. I live for that first 5 minutes after success when you can look back and see a pattern of effort paying off. Which is why I look back at my time at EMC and feel so good about what has happened. I have made a great many friends. I have worked with people that have influenced me greatly. I have made my small dent in the technology world where I could. And beyond all that I have had a blast doing it all. And it would be very easy to stay comfortable and contribute where I am. But, I have been presented with an opportunity to move the ball in a way I have not before. Life is a sequence of opportunities, challenges, and empty-time in between. It is how you handle each of those moments over a long period of time that shapes who you become. This new change for me is both a major challenge and an extremely important opportunity to shape who I become. Which is why I am announcing that I have accepted a position with VMware as an Automation Architect in Cloud Infrastructure and Services. This position presents some very unique challenges and I am joining an amazing team of rockstars. I have very specific challenges in this role [...]
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Oct
17thNote to self : Scary choices pay off
Self-reflection is something I don’t do very often. I tend to focus on the next impossible goal and not look back. But, these last few weeks I spent a lot of my time looking back. I have been thinking about what a great run I have had so far here at EMC. If you would have gone back in time and told me (relevant post : Fear and Atmosphere) that I was going to do some of the things I did in the last 1 ¾ years I would have thought you were crazy. To be honest, when I first joined the vSpecialist team I was scared to death I would fail. I was so far outside my comfort zone going to work for a pre-sales organization with a major vendor that I didn’t have a really good idea what my job would be exactly and if I could do it. Fast forward to now and I am sitting here typing on my Mac and thinking of all the impact that the vSpecialist organization has enabled for me. I have been able to move the ball with vAppliance and Virtual Storage hackery. I made a rap video extolling the tenacity of my group (which was watched by the CEO). I spoke at my first conference session (VMworld). I was able to help do things at both EMCWorld conferences that were never done before (VPLEX demo /Labs). And I released a ton of free tools that helped enable my community. [...]
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Feb
22ndBeing a vSpec : One year under the beltToday is the one year anniversary of joining EMC as a vSpecialist. Kind of feels like I just got here and compared to some of the vets, I have. Still I think back to my first post on moving to the vendor side of things (Change is good : Fear & Atmosphere) and I am amazed at everything that has happened to me since then. As I pointed out back in that blog post. My goal was to surround myself by people that would challenge me in new areas. That has definitely been the case this year and is still a primary motivator for me. I can also say this job has used a broader set of my skills than any other. I decided to throw together a video of random pictures from the last year as a vSpecialist. Here is my year as a vSpec: My Year as a EMC vSpecialist from Nicholas Weaver on Vimeo. I am really looking forward to the rest of 2011 and where my career takes me at EMC. Guess that big step in February of 2010 ended up being a good one after all. .nick
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Sep
30thVision of a creator : The silent revolution in Technology
This post is going to do a couple things I don’t like to do. I am going to use myself as an example. I don’t mind sharing experiences or relaying what I care about. But, I find too much public self-reflection is vain and not much value to others. But I don’t know how else to write this without referring to my own personal experience and approach I have taken, unplanned as it was. So I ask your forgiveness early in this post. I am nothing special and hold no special wisdom or natural ability over you. I may or may not be looking simply from a different perspective. And the only way any solution is solved, improved, or discovered is through approaching from different angles and/or dumb luck.
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Sep
28thYou Really Like Me : Big Thanks
I thought long and hard how to write this post. I actually thought about not writing it and just creating some tool or something to say thanks (I’ll do that also). Yesterday via the vChat video podcast Eric Siebert, Simon Seagrave, David Davis, and special guest John Troyer announced the winners of the Top 25 VMware blog poll. After an awesome introduction by Dr. Steven Herrod, they went through each of the 25 winners in order. I just about fell out of my chair when Nickapedia.com was mentioned as #24. The comments about me were gracious and honestly a little embarrassing. I am happy I am perceived that way but have no idea how the heck I got here I really don’t know the proper way to react other than to say thank you to every single person who voted for me. My hope is that your votes won’t go unrewarded and I promise to work extra hard to provide great content here for you to read/use/download. My goal all along has been to inspire others to do original things and think about stuff in a new way. I take the results of this voting to be a sign that I am heading in the right direction. So once again I want to thanks everyone who voted (and not just for me), Eric Siebert, Simon Seagrave, David Davis, John Troyer, Dr. Steven Herrod, Chad Sakac and my vSpecialist teammates, and the entire VMware community. It is kind of cool to a [...]
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Sep
17thVMworld 2010 : It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad VMworld
What a week. I’ll remember VMworld 2010 as something that went by like a blur. I still think back and think to myself: “Did that really happen?” This post is a good two weeks after the end but I wanted to write about my experiences. This was definitely a strange mixture of hard work, fear, and fun. I think my experiences at VMworld are a testament to how IT is still a pretty fun gig even in this day and age. So of all the big things that went down at VMworld 2010, the vSpecialist’s Delight rap video was probably the most visible I was involved in. Fred Nix and I had been working for months on getting this little video done. It started as a different kind of video and because of legal, PR, and logistical hurdles; it morphed into the final product. This literally started as me pitching what I thought was both a crazy and impossible idea to Fred. Fred, being the crazy guy that he is, called me back a week later and told me: “Dude, it is on…” I still can’t believe all the things that fell into place. From the great talent at PatchWerk Studios to the special roles each of the team members involved in the video shoot performed. My VMworld started off the Friday before. I had to fly in and make a mad dash for the video rental office before they closed. I told the taxi driver I would give him [...]
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