VMware Explore 2024 Las Vegas is in full swing and what a ride it’s been already! I love attending VMware Explore, it’s my favorite event of the year. Having the opportunity to talk to so many amazing people and getting to know them better has been really rewarding.
As much as I love attending sessions, there has always been an itch. An itch to get up there myself and share something I’ve done with the rest of the community.
Explore in Las Vegas this year allowed me to tick off this bucketlist item! I got to present not just one session, but two!
Managing NSX with Terraform
The first session I did was on Monday, together with Evert Amssoms. We had done this session before at the VMUG Belgium in 2023. Since it went so well there, we tried to get it accepted for Explore in Barcelona that year, but it did not work out.
When the call for papers for Explore opened for this year, we tried again but submitted it as a {Code} session. To our delight, we got accepted! After the first excitement had passed, we realized we had to completely rework our session. We had planned to do 45 minutes but realized the {Code} slots were only 25 minutes.
Fortunately, we did not have to do this because the awesome and amazing Franky Barragan reach out to see if we could make it a 45 minute session. This worked out great!
We did rework all of our demos because we felt they were not compelling enough, I think it worked out great in the end!
Presenting the session
Monday came and it was time to present. You can imagine how nervous I was, after discovering an issue with one of our demos an hour before we had to go on stage.
We quickly fixed the issue but the nerves didn’t really come down anymore!
Once we started presenting though, the nerves quickly subsided and I got into the right state of mind. I think the session went really great.
I’m very glad our timing worked the way we wanted to and got through our slides quickly, so we could spend a lot of time on the demos!
At the end we also got a lot of questions, both on and off camera and yesterday as well! I couldn’t be more happy with that.
You can rewatch the session on YouTube now and look at the code for our demos, which was published on my GitHub page.
VMUG Session - Mastering VCP
The second session I did was on Tuesday in the Community theater. I got asked by the awesome folks at VMUG(thanks again Johan for making this happen) to present a session on the VCP certification. Naturally I said yes!
I collected some tips and tricks and personal experiences and shared them with the audience. To me VCP is really just a start and the beginning of your journey into the VCAPs or even VCDX.
For some reason I was more nervous for this session than for my first one. In my opinion the delivery could’ve been a bit better, but that’s a lesson I will take home with me!
You can rewatch the session on YouTube as well!
Up next
Now it’s time to enjoy the rest of the conference, participate in the Odyssey finale and head back home on Friday. Then I will start working on making the sessions even better for Explore in Barcelona!