A Couple of Things

So I know that it has been quite a while since I have posted anything. Needless to say that we all have things that come up in our lives that keep us from doing some of the things we would normally do or things that people would expect us to normally do. This is exactly what has happened to me and this site. There are quite a few things that have happened in the last year, so I feel that I should outline some of those things.

Personal Life

This past year has been somewhat of a whirlwind for me. I had quite a few changes happen over the course of 2016. Some of those changes were stressful, some were good, and some were just flat out bad decisions. Just to clue some of you in on those things and not to get too personal, during 2016 I had the following things happen:

• I changed companies…I know this isn’t exactly personal but in a way it was.
• My oldest son’s Godmother passed away 5 weeks after finding out she had cancer.
• My Father-in-law passed away after a long battle with multiple cancers.
• I adopted my wife’s two teenage boys. (Definitely was an amazing day!)
• I ended up being hospitalized for a hemorrhagic stroke with no deficits. (Thank God for it not causing any deficits!)

So needless to say, personally this year was very trying with both ups and down which we all know one can only handle so much before their Dixie cup is overflowing. I have to say that I handled all of that pretty damn good considering everything.

Professional Life

Professionally, 2016 was a good year. What can you really say about your professionally life? Work is work and we do our best to keep things separated. Most of us do a really good job of it too. Here are some of the things that happened for me this year:

• I changed companies to help spearhead a new practice and lead a team. This has been amazing and definitely something I am proud of.
• I was also asked to start helping develop some of the VMware certification exams as a subject matter expert. This was something that I felt was a ton of fun and definitely challenging. I got to meet quite a few awesome people that I have kept in touch with through that process. I hope to continue my contributions to the certification tracks.
• I have been on and off working on my VCDX design due to time and the things that were going on in my personal life.

Overall, I was able to maintain pretty well.

Now some of you may be reading this wondering, “Why the hell is he telling me all of this?”

I completely understand if you asked yourself that. Just like everything in my life, things happen to pop up without notice and so you have to tackle things as you can and try to appropriate them to your goals and life. One of those things was an opportunity that was presented to me. One that I have been toying with for a while now. I have talked the ears off of a bunch of people over the past year or two regarding where I am at in my career and what might be next for me. What is this opportunity, you ask. Well let me tell you,

I saved 15% by switching to Geico.

Hahahaha, just kidding, seriously though, I have decided to make the jump and join VMware as Senior Technical Solutions Architect on the Global Services Engineering Team. This is definitely something that I am extremely excited about. I am looking forward to the transition from the Partner-side to the Vendor-side and essentially, the Mothership.

This is not to say that I was unhappy at my previous employer…hell…things were just fine for me there. I have been toying with the idea of moving over to VMware for quite some time. The opportunity came knocking once again and this time I felt I was ready to make that jump.

Site Changes

I probably should have written this first but for those of you who have been to my site before, you see that I have switched to a new look. This look is extremely simple and pretty minimal. I believe it is easier to read the content this way. So I hope you enjoy the new design.

So here is to the next year and hopefully a not-so-personally stressful 2017. I hope to be back in the groove of things and blogging again. See you soon!