Name: Lars Troen
Twitter Handle: @larstr
Current employer: Atea
Blog URL: http://core-four.info/ http://vmfaq.com/ http://watchingpaintdryminutebyminute.com/
How did you get into IT in the first place?
I've been a computer enthusiast since I was 13 years old when I first started coding simple games on my 8 bit Acorn Electron micro computer. I wanted to play games like my classmates did with their C64's, so I bought a book about game programming on the BBC B (I later also had a BBC B).
During army service (EW) I had my first contact with Unix. HP UX. A new world revealed itself and I tried to learn as much as I could
After college I started working as a consultant and since I had *ux experience I was given a lot of security related tasks, since the best supported operating systems for hosting firewalls were HPUX and SunOS (mainly CheckPoint & Eagle/Axent/Symantec Raptor). During (or maybe near the end of) the dot com era I joined a company as a programmer and did low and high level programming on different projects before I started working with ESX in 2003 as a consultant and sysadmin. I later started as a consultant with a VAR.
How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?
As mentioned above, I started out with ESX 2.0 in 2003 and was quickly familiar with the VMware newsgroups where I met other people who had discovered VMware's products.
I wrote some graphical performance tool and later I was active in the new web based forums and also other forums on the internet. After the horrible VMTN upgrade in the autumn of 2007 I moved much of my forum activity to Experts-Exchange, but I also used IRC quite a bit at the time. I started blogging on the VMTN Community blog
(http://communities.vmware.com/people/larstr/blog) and I've later moved to my own domain (http://core-four.info/). I'm also contributing to an unofficial knowledgebase at http://vmfaq.com/ and I have a site for my web app at http://vmktree.org/
What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?
1. It's better to know a lot about everything than a little bit about nothing. However: "Jack or all trades, Master of none" may not be optimal so learn to master at least _one_ technology well.
2. Keep your eyes & ears open to other's ideas and emerging technology.
3. if(possible_good_or_perhaps_crazy_idea=true){action(activate_now);}
else {forget(fade_away);}
