Hello, VMware.
Well – that was bracing!
I don’t expect to be posting “week notes” like this on a regular basis, but as a one-off it seems like a nice way to encapsulate just how much happened in the first week of my new role.
Tuesday
Joined VMware. Met new colleagues in London office. Started to look at the User Account and Authentication component in Cloud Foundry. Ran samples against cloudfoundry.com, modified the documentation. Issued first GitHub pull request
Wednesday
More hacking on samples. Updated the Cloud Foundry Google+ page. Agreed to present Cloud Foundry at the London Real-Time hack weekend for the RabbitMQ guys. Watched (and tweeted) the live webcast of the Cloud Foundry first birthday event in San Francisco – very exciting news! “more clouds, more community, more code“, including a broader range of partners, a new governance process around the cloudfoundry.org Open Source project, and the announcement of BOSH being released to the community, too – multi-cloud deployment, here we come!
Thursday
Trip to the VMware Frimley office for some HR stuff. First call with full Developer Relations team for event planning. Briefing with the two directors I work for. Nothing to see here, move along…
Friday
Setup new laptop (custom order from Apple so there was a small delay). Prepped for demo at London Real-Time. Started making a lot of noise on VMware Link (aka Socialcast, the social sharing/discussion platform) internally
Saturday
My first speaking gig – a Lightning Introduction to Cloud Foundry, taking Chris Richardson’s much more comprehensive Boot Camp presentation and cramming the essentials into ~15 min including a live demo, for a bunch of hackers at London Real-Time.
Oh, and it was caught on video.
[vimeo 40379801]
Four or five of the hacks ended up running on Cloud Foundry, too, which I think was rather nice I was also interviewed on realtime and the importance of cloud at the event, but I’ve not seen that video appear just yet.
Monday
More laptop setup, HR stuff. Prep for Scala Days. Started to improve a sample app (Ruby/Sinatra) I’d used in the past by adding Twitter Bootstrap and restructuring the code.
Tuesday/Wednesday
Scala Days in London – helping to man the sponsor stand talking about Cloud Foundry, answering questions, and meeting many new colleagues from the US who were presenting on Spring, Scala, and Cloud Foundry (including an announcement that Play 2.0 framework support and standalone apps are coming to cloudfoundry.com Real Soon Now). Recorded a podcast interview with Uhuru about what a Developer Advocate does.
Summary
I’m pleased that I was able to be so productive so quickly. I’d had a little previous experience with Cloud Foundry but it’s a testament to how quick it is to learn the basics and get moving that I was able to rapidly start playing with a bunch of code. It was also exciting to be out on Github on my first day – not something I could have done in a former life… it’s nice to be working in an organisation that is innovating with Open Source at this level.
There’s much to learn, and to be honest, a couple of the key aspects of Cloud Foundry actually make it more challenging (and interesting) for me to get to grips with. It’s open, and with BOSH, can potentially target different IaaS offerings (initially vSphere and the beginnings of AWS support; a hackathon yesterday aimed at adding OpenStack to the list) – so suddenly I need to know about those. It’s a polyglot platform, which means I need to broaden my language knowledge – I’m already making a start on Ruby and node.js, to complement existing Java and PHP knowledge.
It’s also exciting to learn more about what VMware does, the layers of technology that they offer, and their vision. My previous experience has primarily been with the desktop virtualisation technology, but there’s a huge and vibrant community around the server-side virtualisation tools, and products like Socialcast, Sliderocket and Zimbra in the collaboration space too.
There’s a lot of exciting stuff happening in this space. It’s thrilling to be here. Thanks to all of my new colleagues for a warm welcome and support – looking forward to working with you!
Tagged: #cfoundry, #cloudfoundry, #ldnrealtime, cloud foundry, Coding, development, new job, presentation, rabbitmq, role, sliderocket, socialcast, speaking, video, vmware, zimbra
