#vSensei Newsletter, Vol 1
03 Feb 2016Over the last little while, I’ve been running a sort of Ad-Hoc mentorship program, which to my surprise, is now becoming a bit more serious. While still not formal by any-means, we now have a monthly newsletter. (In case you haven’t yet, you can sign up here for the vSensei newsletter.)
The plan at this stage then, is to publish the prior month’s newsletter as the current month goes live. That is, if you’re not a member, you can still find all but the most current newsletter on this site.
What follows then, is the Janurary edition of the newsletter for public consumption.
It’s an email newsletter Charlie Brown.
I suppose with that begins the vSensei newsletter.
What to Expect
This first one, I suspect, will be unlike those that follow. That is, this time around, one should do some expectation setting. That is, what can one expect from this newsletter, who we are, and all that.
What to Expect from the Newsletter
As stated prior, this time around, expect introductions and logistics. Going forward, I suspect we’ll send one of these monthly, and it’ll include various writings from one of the vSensei mentors in the program. These will cover a variety of “soft skill” areas: How to talk to bosses, Professional writing, transitions, and others.
The newsletter will also contain announcements of upcoming vSensei enrolments, webinars, live events, and the occasional survey.
What to expect from vSensei
Other than bad spelling, grammar, and terrible copy writing, the vSensei is a grass roots effort to build a mentorship practice within the IT practice. As explained to the first few rounds of folks, for the most part, I’m (and to a larger extent we’re) making this up as we go. That is, expect it to be organic, rough around the edges, and the like.
The “Big Picture”, is to eventually turn this into a large, pay it forward, style thing, whether that means ‘mastermind’ groups, or something that looks like an MLM scheme (or even if that’s the route it will go) remains to be seen. Your thoughts, ideas, wishes, wants, and dreams will go a long way to shaping that.
Introductions
So now the introductions! In no particular order:
Scott Lowe
Scott Lowe is a blogger, speaker, best-selling author, and IT industry veteran. Currently, he works for VMware, Inc., on the NSX team. He focuses his time and efforts on open source, cloud computing, virtualization, networking, and related data center technologies. Scott regularly shares technical content and insight on his blog at http://expert.us12.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=43db53ffeb342c41ba20a7097&id=fabf44e9f1&e=f8eeeb843a.
Edward Haletky
Edward L. Haletky, the President, CEO, and principle consultant for AstroArch Consulting, Inc., graduated from Purdue University in 1988 with a degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering. Since then, he has worked with programming graphics and other lower-level libraries on various UNIX platforms. When at Hewlett-Packard, Edward worked in the Virtualization, Linux, and High-Performance Technical Computing teams. Edward is very active on the VMware Communities Discussion Forums providing answers to security and configuration questions and is also one of the VMware Communities User Moderators and Guru. In addition, Edward has earned his LPI, RHCE and VCP certifications, and VMware vExpert designation. Edward is a very active analyst, writer, and blogger with in the virtualization space.
Jordan Rinke
CTO for Canada’s largest virtual network provider iTel Networks. One of the original OpenStack for Hyper-V developers. Part of the original Cloud Builders group at Rackspace, deployed the first non-NASA OpenStack Compute cluster. Helped build the first Canadian OpenStack installation. A rare lover of Microsoft, Linux, and Open source. Infrastructure engineer turned developer - with a keen understanding of both in mixed OS environments. His entire career has been about making massive infrastructure go faster. With startup experience and hyperscale experience he has an understanding of bootstrapping a service for dollars a month with a built in ability to scale as money permits, to orchestrating the migration of 5000vms and keeping an e-commerce site online with 20,000 concurrent users.
Trevor Roberts
Trevor Roberts, Jr. is the Senior Technical Marketing Manager for OpenStack at VMware and the lead author of the VMware Press Title, “DevOps for VMware Administrators”. He enjoys speaking to customers and partners about the benefits of using OpenStack with VMware technologies.
Trevor has the CCIE Data Center certification, and he is a VMware Certified Advanced Professional in the Data Center Design and Administration concentrations.
In his spare time, Trevor shares his insights on data center technologies at http://expert.us12.list-manage.com/track/click?u=43db53ffeb342c41ba20a7097&id=bac191e4a8&e=f8eeeb843a via the vBrownBag Professional OpenStack and Professional VMware podcasts, and on Twitter (@VMTrooper). His contributions to the IT community have garnered recognition by his designation as a VMware vExpert, Cisco Data Center Champion, and EMC Elect.
Cody Bunch
(That’s me)
Me, I do things. I’ve published a few books, I’ve worked with others to help them get down that path. I’ve spoken at some events, and again, have helped some others down that path. I helped start a podcast, which in turn has helped some folks take that next step. I also want to do more.
Upcoming Events
- 15/02/2016: Sign-ups for H1 2016 Open
- 19/02/2016: Sign-ups for H1 2016 Close
- 22/02/2016: Selected Mentees Notified
Next Issue
Next time around, we’ll have a guest post by a former (and ongoing) mentee, on selecting the value of, and selecting a mentorship program, as well as