We’re pleased to bring you a conversation with William Lam, Staff Engineer II working within the VMware R&D organization and creator of the ever-popular VirtuallyGhetto.com. The Whisperers spoke with William back at VMworld, and due to a number of lost files and a miraculous backup copy, we now deliver it to you.
We discuss:
- Joining R&D from the customer side of the story
- The transition from TME to R&D Engineering
- Filtering content and serving it up to the customer
- Feeling closer to the customer by playing with the software
- His role is diverse: “today could be VSAN, tomorrow could be NSX”
- Starting early in blogging
- Doubting the value of his blog (he didn’t believe people would read his blog)
- The naming of Virtually Ghetto and its humble beginnings
- Advocating for the customer within the company
- Not worrying about politics or swim lanes, but doing the best work for the customer
- Having engineers who wrote the code troubleshoot using your blog
- Answering the questions: what are the use cases, how is it getting used, how do you fix it?
- Providing feedback from customer back into engineering as well
- Working for the enterprise versus playing in the startup lands
- How’d you get here? Honestly no clue
- Safe is a relative idea that doesn’t always make good or bad
- We all have non-linear paths to the roles we get to
- Do the work and share it publicly
- Career planning is not his favorite thing – keep up with the passion
- One takeaway: persevere. It will show
- Gut versus metrics? He’s a gut guy
- Fulfill the commitment and keep going forward
- Don’t run away from the fear – there’s good from it
You can follow William on Twitter @lamw and on his incredible blog, Virtually Ghetto. Thanks for this episode and thanks for the backup copy Mark!
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