Blog date: July 9th, 2019

This post is a little late, considering the Denver VMUG UserCon was on April 9th, but alas I have been traveling a lot over the past few months

The Denver UserCon was my first time speaking at a public event in front of a large audience. Public speaking is something that I have thought about doing for a while now, and how fitting that my first event, be a year after my very first UserCon attendance, at the very same venue. If I am completely honest, as this was my first time, I was a little nervous, but like anything you just have to take that leap of faith.

My good friend Ariel Sanchez (@arielsanchezmor) has been encouraging me to start this journey, and because this will give me the skills I need for a future role as a marketing engineer, I decided this would be the year to get my feet wet. But what to present?

I’d like to think that most presenters have a blog, that they can reshape into a power point presentation, so I submitted two community sessions. One about vROps, and the other about VMware homelabs. We in the #vCommunity use home labs a lot. Not only our daily use, but to better ourselves professionally. Home labs give us a safe place to experiment with new VMware releases, plan upgrades, and just familiarize ourselves with other products that we may not have a chance to work with in a production environment.

As such, the VMUG community leadership selected my presentation on “How VMware Home labs How a VMware Home lab Can Accelerate Your Career”.

Given the amount of attendees who came to learn and support my first presentation, I’d say that the desire to learn and build a VMware home lab is strong.

I’m not going to lie, as this was my first time, I was certainly nervous. Breath…..count to five……..jump. The presentation was well received, and my friends who joined in support, gave me some positive feedback, along with constructive feedback for improvement.

The evening was capped off with a nice dinner with friends from the #vCommunity.

A special thank you to the Denver VMUG leadership team, who invited me out to meet and share with the community: Jason Valentine (@JasonV_VCP5), Tony Gonzalez (@vGonzilla) and Scott Seifert (@vScottSeifert)