Update: the video for my session can be found HERE (it is in Dutch!) or watched down below 🙂

I know I used it before but Ooooooooooooh what a rush where the last two days. It’s the day after when I am writing this but like I said on twitter I am still bouncing around after the Dutch VMUG UserCon. My own session went great and hopefully I can put the link to the video here very soon. What I can do is give you the slide deck I used and you can find it at the bottom of this post. The only thing I changed was that I added a translated disclaimer since I had way too much fun creating that one. I did create it as a parody of all the VMworld and .Next disclaimers and because I was in the last timeslot of the day and wanted to give the audience something to laugh when they walked in so they would stay awake after a tiring day at our mini VMworld.

Day one

Now about those two days, at the first day I was one of the three judges in our first (hopefully annual) Hackathon. We had three teams, two from partners: ITQ & PQR and one, that got dragged in by their TAM, from the customer side. PQR build a combination of VRA, home automation and Lego Mindstorms. They gave a voice command to a homey and the Lego Mindstorms robot showed the status of the new vm request while Ikea Tradiri would also show the status with a colored bulb. When a vm was rejected the robot dumped the bit the used as example in the bin aka off the table :D. Team ITQ wanted to deploy a PKS cluster by using giving an Amazon Alexa a voice command that in its turn used a slack channel as messagebus to get things deployed. Not everything worked perfect but in the end they were able to ask Alexa for a Minecraft server and a Steve webinterface would give visual feedback if it worked. As an easteregg Steve could also do a barrel roll. Team Dictu had a different use case, they are busy implementing VRA and their TAM though it was a good idea to get some practice at the Hackathon, they did end up deploying things after some waiting on the slow wifi. For me they were the winners for trying to do something almost new to them and getting results as well. That is why I gave them my personal spot price: a six-pack of Achelse Kluis Trappist beer. Overall, we decided not to have a real winner but everyone won as it should be. The theme of Fun, beer and Gyros fitted perfectly and together with everyone who was there I am sure we had an awesome time. Just next year I might think about creating a non-company but vCommunity team of all sorts to do some EUC stuff.

During the day at day one there were also several VMware R&D sessions (NDA I believe) and a VCDX workshop. The R&D Sessions could use some more audience but the vcdx workshop was very full I believe. For me day one was already a huge success while day two was still coming.

Day two

Day two or more actually UserCon day. I must admit that I didn’t attend a lot of sessions but the keynote by no-one else then Pat Gelsinger was great. He did not get a lot of questions during the q&a part but it filled the time and he had to use the I cannot confirm nor deny that several times. Some of the sessions I attended where a NSX jumpstart for VDI by Pascal van de Bor, a security awareness session (marketed as security for EUC admins & Consultants) and some others. At 15.50h it was time for my own session that was in fact an introduction to PowerCLI for Horizon View. I managed to spoon-feed the audience 61 slides in a bit over 20 minutes without them even noticing it. I had 16 slides with static content including vmug, title, introduction and overview pages. The rest where simply moving gifs (without loops!) that I recorded using ScreentoGif. This allowed me to demo the functions and usage of the results without boring the audience with 10 minutes of typing errors by doing it manually. And yes, some things I had to do over 10 times to get it rights so it was worth doing it that way. I managed to get myself in a relaxed state by listening to some music (Katie Melua this time) while going through the deck one last time. During the presentation I hardly felt the nerves and even managed to keep my cool and not speak too fast like I did before. While last year with Hans it was a success this time was even better and I was really satisfied with the results.

You can find the final presentation here: https://wkursten.stackstorage.com/s/Y8hkexL8qDTXVVb it was built in Dutch but most are demos anyway.