All Good Things…

As the proverb goes – all good things must come to an end. My last day at VMware was July 19th, completing a 7.5 year run. VMware has an internal Slack bot that let you check your tenure against the rest of the employees – when I left, I had been at VMware longer than 83% of the fulltime employees!

VMware technology has been my primary career focus since 2006. Even though I’m still 20 years from retirement, I thought I might end up retiring at VMware. Then came the Broadcom acquisition. The day the rumors broke, May 23rd, I knew it was more than rumor – I knew that it was a done deal. I started passively looking for a new job that day. By May 26th the deal was official, and I started an active job search.

I don’t believe VMware’s story is over. If I did, I wouldn’t have accepted a new role working with VMware technology. But the VMware that I knew will be gone by next year, living on as a brand of Broadcom. Rather than waiting to have my path decided for me by Broadcom, I selected a path that I think fits perfectly into my career evolution. I’m pleased to announce I accepted a job offer as a VMware Specialist Solutions Architect at AWS!

Thank you

Many extremely talented people at VMware helped me get to where I am today. I couldn’t possibly thank them all here, but here are five people who taught me career-transforming skills.

Jeff Eberhard – Jeff was my first manager at VMware. He gave me a shot. I was an engineer that had never been in presales. If Jeff hadn’t taken a risk on me, this story ends before it starts. Jeff was everything you want in a manager – a teacher, a counselor, a guide, and sometimes a tow truck for when I slid off the road!

Jim Stone – When I arrived at VMware, I felt exhilaration! This was quickly replaced by the feeling of drowning under the force of the largest firehose of knowledge that I had ever seen. Jim was my guide – an extraordinarily knowledgeable SE with a gift for teaching technology. I don’t think I would have survived my first 6 months without him.

Michael Gasch – My mentor for my Take3 project. I was able to spend 3 months dedicated to VEBA, with Michael spending tons of time guiding me. Michael taught me that the docs you write are just as important as the code you write. Michael’s passion for event-driven automation inspired me to build content and functions to help others unlock this awesome power.

Nico Vibert – Nico taught me that I could author Flings ( PyVMC / SDDC Import/Export ), even though I’m not a professional developer. These Flings have helped customers and partners make the most out of the VMC on AWS API. The ability to invoke an API is arguably the #1 required cloud skill.

William Lam – Any list of the most respected members of the VMware community has to include William. William’s contributions have consistently dug me out of technical holes for more than a decade. What VMware customers see externally is a fraction of what he contributes internally. Pat Gelsinger used to talk about VMware’s shift to a multi-cloud company as its ‘second act’. It was William’s guidance that pushed me into my career’s second act. Without William, I wouldn’t have learned Git, Python, Kubernetes, or the countless other skills I picked up while working on VEBA. I was trapped in old school thinking that sysadmins didn’t need to bother learning these areas of tech. But they are key skills – required knowledge for a transformation from VMware architect to cloud architect.

I am excited to take my cloud skills to the next level at AWS!