Goals for 2017 - Results

Tags: Personal - VMUG
Posted on January 18, 2018 by Mads Fog Albrechtslund

2017 has come to an end, and it is therefor time to look back on my goals for the year. Generally speaking I did not succeed with all my tech related goals of 2017 as documented below.
But on the personal side a lot of other things have happened, the wife and I had a son in February, whom is thriving. Our daughter now almost 7 years old, started school last summer and have been very happy with it.
And on top of that we had a very long remodelling of our livingroom, which is now almost finished.

Additional information of the progress of the year can be found in the in the Half Way post

  • Energy efficient Homelab
    The goal was to build a energy efficient Homelab, and place it in the attic.
    The result ended up being described here: Homelab – 2017 Mid and in the Half Way post
    But the Homelab was not placed in the attic, instead I re-wired part of the house with a CAT6 Ethernet cable, so I could place the Homelab in our wash/storage room.
    2 great things about that, it allowed for easier access and the excess heat from the Homelab are now going into that room, which normally don’t have any heating.

  • More blogposts
    My goal was at least 12 blog posts, and I ended up doing exactly 12 blog posts.
    I would have liked to do more, but at least I made my goal on this one.

  • VMUG presentation
    No VMUG presentation for me in 2017, although I have already done one in 2018, at the Nordic VMUG on Janaury 11th 2018.
    I did do 2 other presentations, at 2 Proact customer events, so at least I managed to do some presentations in 2017.

  • Code sharing
    Plan was to share whatever code I wrote in 2017, and that I failed. I have written quite a bit of vRO code as part of a large project for Nordea Bank. Automating security settings on their 2.000 ESXi Hosts, automating 200 Reservations in their vRA platform and automating the import of 20.000 VMs into the same vRA platform.
    But Nordea Bank have complete ownership of that code, so I have not been allowed to share it.
    And besides that large project, I have not found the time and energy to produce much else code, and therefor have not had anything to share.

  • International conference
    In 2017 I was not able to attend a international conference, the closest I came was in January 2017 when most of Proact Europe was assembled in Prague for a Kick-Off event for the roughly 600 Proact employees attending.

  • User Groups

    • Veeam User Group Denmark (VeeamUGDK)
      As planed we managed to hold 2 VeeamUGDK meetings in 2017, one in June and another in October.

    • VMware Automation User Group Denmark (VMAUGDK)
      With the VMAUGDK team we succeeded in being part of the larger VMUG meeting in March 2017, which had multiple tracks and therefor where able to accommodate the 3 Danish VMUG Special Interest Groups; Automation, Operations and EUC.

  • Podcast
    I managed to get invited onto a podcast, but ended up not being part of it.
    It was the Arrow Blogger Board podcast (in Danish), but just as the remote recording was to start I accidentally spilled a large glass of water into my MacBook Pro. So the last thing Michael Ryom, being one of the other guests, saw over the video feed was me pulling my laptop fast of the table and flipping it over to try and get the water out. And then it just died.
    After 48 hours in rice it booted again. It only had 2 problems; a dead battery and that it was extremely slow, which I at the time did not have a good explanation for.
    After several weeks working on a extremely slow MacBook Pro, I figured out what was going on. I found the Intel Power Gadget application, which could show the real-time speed of the CPU in MHz. And it turned out the MacBook Pro was only running at 800Mhz, although still on all 4 cores.
    After a bit more researched I found out that if a MacBook Pro don’t have a battery attached (primeraly meant for older MacBook Pro’s with removable batteries) it will throttle down, because the power supply is actually not powerfull enough to run the computer at peak speeds without the help of the battery.
    So after a battery and top-case and keyboard and trackpad replacement (as all of those are one big joint part), it now works at full speed again.

  • Blog sponsors
    I did do a rewrite of the HTML and CSS of my blog to be able to have ads on the right side of the page, and I managed to get a sponsor deal with Veeam. But after some time, I pulled the plug. The ad, being JavaScript based and remotely hosted just was not good for performance on my blog.
    So I ended up removing the ads section again, and instead doing some additional speed optimization on my site.

  • vRealize Orchestrator Book Project
    This failed again this year. I only manage to get some very light work done on this project.
    I have not giving up on this project yet, but now with 2 kids, there is even less time for this. I am still hoping to be able to find the time, and get this project going.

  • vExpert and Veeam Vanguard
    I have submitted my applications for both the VMware vExpert and Veeam Vanguard programs, so now there is just the hoping and waiting left to do.

  • Certifications
    My plan was to do one of the two VMware Cloud Management and Automation (CMA) VCAPs and the Veeam Certified Architect. The result: none, nada, nothing.
    This I am not satistfied with at all, so I will have to do much better here in 2018 on this part.

  • Book reading list
    The goal was to read both VMware vRealize Orchestrator Cookbook - Second Edition and Mastering vRealize Automation 7.1.

    I read neither of those. But I did read/hear several Audiobooks while driving in my car.

Tags: Personal - VMUG
Posted on January 18, 2018 by Mads Fog Albrechtslund