Blogging barrier – The last 83 days in retrospect

I’m not a famous blogger like Vladan Seget, Duncan Epping or William Lam to name a few in the world of Virtualization/IT. I just blog for fun and because I know that some of my posts really helped people, including myself, to solve their problems. My daily job doesn’t include content creation and I’m not rely on my blog for earning money. Please don’t get me wrong. Having a blog as main income is nothing bad it’s quite the opposite. You have a lot of recurring readers and people know you at conferences or other events. The downside of this is that you need to create content every week or even multiple times a week to keep the bar and readers high. That means you need interesting topics and also time to write all the content. This can be very challenging, nearly impossible, if you have a “normal” job beside your blog.
My last post was 83 days / 2 month 22 days / 11 weeks 6 days or 1992 hours ago and the reason(s) for that was that I really couldn’t managed it to get free time or my motivation was not so big to complete some drafts. Sometime I also ended up playing Diablo 3 Season 6 to clear my mind and relax from a stressful day! 🙂
I thought my first post after this “short break” could be a quick retrospect about what happened in the last 83 days. I can put your mind at ease! It will not be a summary about every single day of the last 83 days! 🙂 I will only include the highlights I swear.

Veeam Vanguard

Veeam launched last year it’s community program Veeam Vanguard. Veeam Vanguards are people who embrace Veeam the best in their respective communities. They come from all backgrounds and are spread across different products. Partners, customers, influencers and others are represented here. The first round of Vanguards was carefully picked by Veeam employees without any public nomination process. For the second round Veeam opened a public nomination process on March 1st where I threw in my nomination. On April 1st nominations were closed and I got the following e-Mail on April 4th from Rick Vanover:

Congratulations! You have been selected for the 2016 Veeam Vanguard Program.

I was shocked and honored at the same time. I never thought that I would be selected as Vanguard but I’m really proud to be part of this group of extraordinary people. One of the benefits of this program was that I was invited to attend a new advanced course in London which Veeam is currently developing and be able to give feedback about the course and the content. I also attended the VeeamON forum in London the same week. All of this was really pretty cool. But the best thing of all of this was that I have met fellow Vanguards from all over the world, I only knew from Twitter or their blogs like Anthony Spiteri (www.anthonyspiteri.net, Virtualization is Life!, Australia), Matt Crape (www.42u.ca, Matt That IT Guy, Canada) or Paolo Valsecchi (www.nolabnoparty.com, NoLabNoParty, Italy).
If you are interested who else is a Veeam Vanguard you can find it here.

vExpert NSX 2016

On April 21st I got an e-Mail from the vExpert program introducing a new sub-category of the vExpert program, vExpert NSX. The nomination was opened until end of May and again I threw my name into the hat. I’m VCIX-NV/VCP(6)-NV and I had quite a lot of conversation with my and other customers about NSX and how it can make their network life easier. The only problem was that it was only internally and I hadn’t any post about NSX. But I was little bit optimistic. 🙂
On June 17th I received an e-Mail from Corey Romero with the announcement of the group of vExpert NSX 2016 and I was honored to be part of this group.

Top vBlog 2016 Voting

Another annual checkpoint during the IT year is Eric Sieberts Top vBlog voting. There were some changes in the 2016 voting process that made it little bit more interesting. The important change was that a blog needed to have a minimum of 10 posts per year. Last year I promoted myself with a post and ended up at #187. This year I thought I will not do anything to promote myself. I also had no time to write a “Please vote” post. When the announcement of the full list was made public on July 1st Andreas congratulated me for my spot in the results. Curios about the result I checked the Top vBlog 2016 voting full results and found myself at #79. “What? Wow! How did this happen?”, was my first thought but I was happy climbing up 108 spots. There were also 53 votes for my blog, so somebody is really reading it! 🙂 This was really an unexpected result. I also check the spot of my fellow Austrian Virtualization blogger and friend Andreas Lesslhumer and www.running-system.com made it finally into the Top50 at #49. Big achievement and congratulation for being in the Top50.

Promotion

After my hard work as a Technical Account Manager and as somebody who goes the extra mile, I finally got promoted to Senior Technical Account Manager in June just in time before I started my parternity leave.

Job, Family and paternity leave

The biggest reason I was so busy was that I started my 4 month paternity leave on June 20th and before that I needed to handover all my customers to my stand-ins for this period of time. It was little bit challenging to get all the required people in a meeting but finally everything went smooth. In Austria there are different models of paternity leave. We chose the 12+2 income dependent model. This means that my wife was 12 month on leave and I can go 2 month paid by the public health insurance company. The remaining 2 month are unpaid. Between the change we can overlap a month. The whole family started my leave with going on vacation. We went to Mallorca with our little lady Johanna and it was a lot of fun watching her at the pool or playing at the beach. I was building some awesome sand castles and Johanna destroyed them every single time with a smile on her face. 🙂
Currently the last week of the overlapping month starts and my wife will go to work again on Monday July 25th. That means that at this time I’m home alone with the kid and I hope I will not get totally destroyed! I’m really looking forward to these times and I still hope I have time during her naps to finish some posts.