As nominations rolled into my inbox these past 2 weeks, I knew I was going to have a difficult time determining who to select as the first winner of the VMTN Community Warrior Badge. The nominations I’ve received have been inspiring, as they captured two elements that drive our community perfectly: giving back and gratitude. In the end, it was simple because I could not fight the flood of emails I was receiving around one particular user: @LucD
I’m excited to announce that @LucD is the first winner of the VMTN Community Warrior Badge.
Thank you to everyone who submitted. This is an example of one of many glowing nominations I received for @LucD:
@BenLiebowitz: LucD – Luc is constantly replying to posts in the PowerCLI Community. If you post a question, he has a reply for you within 30-60 minutes, EVEN ON THE WEEKENDS! Everytime I go into that community to try and answer some posts, I’m too late, and Luc has answered them all. I’ve subscribed to the forum and see throughout the day that he’s replied and answered questions. – Luc is also a vExpert and active in the VMware {code} arena as well.
I had the opportunity to get to know this Community Warrior a little better. Check it out:
K: How did you first get involved with VMware Communities and what inspires you to stay involved?
L: Like most users I guess. I subscribed to the VMTN communities when our company started using VMware products. For me that was way back in 2005, when we started to officially virtualize our server environment. At that time I was what could be considered a “lurker”. Reading and learning from the entries in the VMTN communities.
When I was accepted to the PowerCLI beta, late 2007, I started to contribute, primarily to the PowerCLI VMTN community. Mostly questions at that time 🙂
When PowerCLI went public in 2008, the PowerCLI community became a very active place. Since I had the good fortune to have been involved with PowerCLI from early on, I felt it only normal to give back to the community, by replying to threads from new users.
My motivation to stay active in the VMTN community is of course my love for automation and the appreciation for this wonderful, free product VMware invests in.
K: Which communities do you spend the most time on and why?
L: The PowerCLI community, including all its sub communities, and the Onyx community. Because of my love for all things automation, these communities could be considered as my natural habitat J
To a somewhat lesser degree in the ThinApp and Workstation communities. Primarily because I’m a user of both of these products, not only at work, but also in my Home lab. And my job, but also my moderator tasks, take me to several other communities. These include SDDC Management, End User Computing and Best Practices, and all their child communities
K: What do you consider the most underrated function offered within communities? (private messaging, option to follow, RSS feeds, etc…?)
L: The Search function. Perhaps not the most obvious functionality, but it is the ideal way to explore the wealth of information that is available in the huge VMTN repository. I often see questions from users, which could have been answered in a couple of minutes with a decent search. I find the “Restrict results by Place” and the “Sort By” fields very useful. I would love a way to save and share searches.
K: Tell us one or two fun facts that we would not know about you from your community involvement.
L: The way I got onto Twitter was quite funny. In 2008 I won, to my surprise, the VI Toolkit Scripting contest. The price consisted of an all-expenses paid trip to VMworld in Las Vegas. While I was there, I was talking with Pablo Roesch, while having a beer (I’m Belgian after all J). He suggested that I should start sharing some of my PowerCLI community answers/scripts with a bigger audience, and that a blog would be the ideal way to do that. Thanks to the IOT, yes, they had Internet access in casinos way back in 2008, I immediately tried to create a Twitter account to get things going. Unfortunately, the obvious handle LucD was already taken. We added the suffix 22, which is the day of my birthday, not my age. I’m pretty sure, I have one of the few Twitter handles that was created in a bar, in a casino, in Las Vegas.
And now you all know why the 22 is in the handle.
Thanks @LucD and congratulations!
Follow @LucD on VMTN, Twitter (@LucD22), and check out his blog http://lucd.info. He is also very active on Slack as @lucd in the VMware {code} and vExpert teams.
With that, I open nominations. Who will be the next VMTN Community Warrior Badge winner?
Message @KTbradley on VMTN or email [email protected] to submit a community member. Nominations do carry over from previous weeks if your original nominee was not selected. For more program details, go here.
