The VMware VMUG UserCon has been my favourite local (Australian) event since attending my first one in 2017. It is one of the standout events for community sessions and networking and one I personally look forward to every year.
The teams involved with VMUG and especially the local VMUG members in Sydney and Melbourne do a fantastic job every year of bringing everyone together and handling the logistics. Things will of course be different this year with the event going virtual, but I’m still looking forward to it on Thursday the 30th of July, 2020.
The keynote speaker this year is Joe Beda, a principal engineer at VMware who came across with the acquisition of Heptio, and Joe is well known as a co-founder of Kubernetes.
As of the time of publishing this post (mid-July), I can’t seem to locate a public agenda for the event, but I have seen some comments on twitter from those who have submitted sessions and I can truly say that you will get a lot of value from attending this event.
The virtual events can certainly be difficult to stay engaged with. I’m not familiar with the platform being used to deliver the VMUG UserCons, but I do hope that there is some Q&A time in each of the sessions to allow for that much needed interaction. I heard that the keynote will be recorded which is unfortunate, but I believe Joe will be online to engage with the community.
My own two cents in regards to attending, is to try and treat it as separate from a normal work day, as if you’d actually made the effort to travel to the venue. Switch off your emails and close all of the other applications on your computer. Depending on your home or office situation, maybe even try to set up in a different location such as on the lounge room TV to break it up a little bit.
The event is of course free and you can register at the following URL - https://vmugvirtualaustraliausercon.vfairs.com/
Given it is a virtual event, the registration is open to everyone world wide, so as long as the time difference isn’t too painful, or you want to be up at some late or early hours, go ahead and register and I hope to “see” you there!