*With the below announcement, nominations are now open for winner #3!*
Maybe I’m a sap, but again I found it extremely difficult to sift through all of the fantastic nominations I’ve been receiving and select our next Community Warrior. What swayed me was the nomination from our first warrior @LucD, which was just one of many I received for this individual:
“For my nomination, I would propose Wil (wila).
He’s an active, friendly and knowledgeable Community member/moderator.
Wil has a very keen and analytical mind.
Imho, it’s people like Wil that make VMTN a success with users.”
In my honest opinion, I agree. Congratulations, @Wila on receiving the second Community Warrior Badge Award this year! Also, check out the new, spiffy Community Warrior badge…
What’s striking about the Community Warrior Badge Program is the opportunity to glance into the dynamic use cases happening daily within VMTN. @LucD was sharing scripts and fulfilling his passion for automation by helping others. @Wila is an End-User Computing expert and also an inventor who taps into a completely different side of communities. Learn a little bit more about @Wila:
K: After spending 10+ years on VMTN, and 7 years moderating, what is one moment that stands out as the most memorable?
W: I’ve tried to think about it, but I could not single out one moment that stands out for me, instead there are many. When a user comes to the forum for help with his/her problem then the moment that stands out for me is when the user comes back with the answer on what helped fix their issue. This is what it is all about as far as I’m concerned. The answer to a problem, one that also helps others.
Either by googling and finding an answer to their issue that way or by us volunteers trying to help out as it helps in learning what eventually fixed their issue.
K: As a community veteran, in your opinion what is the most underrated function offered within communities?
W: The overview page of each forum has a bunch of links to great articles that answer quite a few problems people have. Sometimes they refer to older products, but most often what is stated there is still relevant. In addition, the official documentation for the products that I spent most of my time helping out – VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation – have great tidbits and are well worth bookmarking.
K: Tell us one or two fun facts that we would not know about you from your community involvement.
W: Most people in the VMware community have a day job in virtualization. In my case, I’m just a user (*) of VMware Workstation/Fusion. At my day job my income comes from writing source code as a consultant for other software companies, mostly business and/or database oriented software. Most of that is done in a programming language called DataFlex, which happens to be very unknown, but powerful. I also run an Open Source website for that programming language and have helped to built a variety of software and components for it. For example, the code editor I write most of my source code in – not just DataFlex – was written using DataFlex and some sprinkles of C++ here and there.
(*) That was correct until October last year, I have since launched a product called Vimalin. Vimalin can be used for backing up VMware Fusion virtual machines, so I finally stepped a bit beyond the line of “just user” of VMware products. The reason for me in building that product was that I saw quite a few people depending on Time Machine for backups, only to find out that Time Machine is not reliable for that kind of backup (large binaries files changing over time). Apologies for the sales speech, however it is also an attempt in me helping out, the free version of Vimalin can still backup/restore your important VMs. The commercial variant has a few more features and helps me in being able to dedicate more time and improve Vimalin and add features.
K: What is the best way to connect with you?
It’s inspirational to see users who not only gain from the community, but spend an equal, likely larger amount of time giving back. Reach out to @Wila to congratulate him, follow him, and try out Vimalin.
Then be sure to submit your nominations for Community Warrior #3. Who has stood out in your favored community lately? What warrior has been knocking down questions left and right? Contact the Community Manager @KTbradley on VMTN or through email at [email protected].
