#VMworld 2016 – Day 1, #vBrownbag and VMware Code Hackathon

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Published on 30/8/2016 - Read in about 2 min (399 words)

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Day 1 keynote

I’m not going to lie, the start to the keynote was weird. There was drums and poetry. I will say no more. Another thing I’m not going to do (because many people do it far better than me - I’m looking at you Julian) is do a blow-by-blow account of the keynotes, for me the headlines are that VMware announced VMware Cloud Foundation and Cross Cloud Services.

VCAP6-DCV Deploy

After the keynote I headed over to the exam center to sit the VCAP6-DCV deploy. I covered my exam experience here, so I won’t repeat that!

vBrownbag

I sat through a few vBrownbag community talks after the exam, two in particular I enjoyed:

While you’re on YouTube, check out the vBrownbag channel, there’s a huge back catalogue of fantastic community talks, and maybe consider doing one yourself!

Breakout Session - #HBC8563 VMs and Containers: Extending Docker to vCloud Air

This was my first breakout session this year and it had some really cool demos using docker-machine to build containerised applications out in vCloud Air. The speaker Kevin Gorman was engaging and took the audience from the basics of containerisation and a comparison of Virtual Machines and Containers to some more advanced theory around how to successfully create next-gen microservice applications.

VMware Code Hackathon

My evening’s entertainment was taking part in the first VMware Code Hackathon! I was on a team with PowerShell and automation legend Luc Dekens and some other great guys, developing a new class for Luc’s PowerShell DSC module for vSphere. We actually made some great progress in the 3 hours but unfortunately our lab let us down and we weren’t able to show our work. You can, however, see the addition on Luc’s Github page for the project.

The hackathon has been one of the best learning experiences I’ve had at VMworld (and I’ve had a lot of really good ones!) - it was great to be part of a team that is formed and creates something in a few hours, as well as learning by osmosis when you work with really smart people.

Oh, and there was beer and food too! Rumour has it that there’s a good chance this will happen at VMworld Barcelona too, so if you’re going, get involved!