They say the only constant in life is change. Looking back at my career and this blog over the past fifteen years, that statement couldn’t be more accurate.
After a lot of thought, I have decided that I will not be applying for the VMware vExpert program for the upcoming year. Having held the vExpert title continuously for 13 years (2014–2026), it is time for me to officially close this chapter.
Looking Back: 13 Years as a vExpert
I still remember the day I received my very first vExpert Award back in April 2014. I was lying in bed on sick leave when my phone suddenly started buzzing like crazy with Twitter notifications from fellow Polish engineers congratulating me. I genuinely couldn’t believe it.
That recognition opened up an incredible world. VMware fundamentally shaped my career. When I started diving deep into ESXi, vCenter, and vSAN all those years ago, it transformed my professional path. It taught me how enterprise infrastructure actually works, pushed me to learn relentlessly, and opened doors to opportunities I never imagined when I first started in IT.
Along the way, I met some of the most talented, generous, and inspiring people in the industry.
First and foremost, thank you to Corey Romero for leading the vExpert program with so much energy, dedication, and care for all of us over the years. Building and running a global community of that scale is no small feat, and Corey made every vExpert feel valued.
A very personal thank you goes to Maciej Lelusz. Years ago, when I was first considering applying, Maciej was the first Polish vExpert. I remember our countless emails, phone calls, and discussions where he shared advice, encouraged me, and showed me how to get started. Maciej is a phenomenal engineer, a great friend, and someone I continue to deeply respect.
To the entire Polish and global vExpert community: thank you. It has been an open, welcoming, and collaborative group of peers, and I carry nothing but fond memories from our meetups, discussions, and conferences.
The War Stories We Still Laugh About
Working with enterprise virtualization in large environments always comes with memorable moments. A few still make me and my former colleagues laugh to this day:
The Infamous “VLAN 0” Outage in Tadnet
Back when I was working at the European Central Bank (ECB), we had a large internal test and staging environment nicknamed Tadnet. It was actively used by dozens of engineers testing live vCenter deployments and workloads.
One afternoon, while tweaking network configs on a distributed vSwitch, I managed to misconfigure the VLAN tagging and set it to VLAN 0. Instantly, the entire Tadnet environment dropped off the network. Because vCenter was hosted inside the very environment I just isolated, I locked myself out completely.
I had to swallow my pride, walk over to the network team, and ask them to use their out-of-band management route into the hosts just to revert my portgroup change and restore the proper VLAN. We still joke about “VLAN 0” whenever network tagging comes up.
IBM XIV Storage Acceleration: “…But Why?”
Another classic memory was back in the ESXi 4.0 days with IBM XIV enterprise storage arrays. I spent hours reading deep technical documentation and figured out how to install custom IBM host storage acceleration plugins (the early days of VAAI hardware offloading) across all our ESXi hosts to speed up Storage vMotion and cloning operations.
Proud of my optimization, I called my manager over: “Look, I just deployed hardware acceleration for our entire IBM XIV storage fleet across all cluster hosts!”
He looked at the screen, paused for three seconds, looked back at me, and deadpanned: "…But why?"
I just stood there: “Well… fair enough.”
Why It Is Time to Move On
In everyone’s career, there comes a point where you need to make deliberate choices rather than just staying on autopilot.
Over the last two to three years, I noticed a clear shift: writing about VMware simply stopped bringing me the same excitement it once did. Years ago, blogging about vSphere was pure fun because I was living in it every single day.
Since joining Google in 2019 and immersing myself in public cloud, that dynamic began to change. VMware naturally took a backseat to cloud-native architectures, serverless platforms, and edge networking. Over the past year, I realized that writing about Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) had started to feel like an obligation tied to my day job rather than a spontaneous passion project.
If I am forcing myself to write about something just to maintain a status or title, it is a clear sign that something needs to change.
The Next Chapter
Technology doesn’t stand still. VMware and traditional virtualization have matured into established, reliable enterprise commodities. But the technological frontier has moved, and my curiosity has moved with it.
Over the last two years, my focus has shifted entirely toward:
- Cloud-Native & Serverless Architecture: Building resilient systems on Google Cloud Run, Cloudflare Pages, and edge proxies.
- Modern Homelab Engineering: Ditching hypervisors and heavy VMs on my Minisforum MS-01 in favor of over 70 containerized Docker services, Traefik double-proxy routing, and Kopia 3-2-1 backups.
- Self-Hosted AI & Agentic Tooling: Running vLLM inference on high-end GPUs (NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 with 96GB VRAM), integrating Open WebUI with local search, building autonomous agents like Hermes, and exploring the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
I want this blog to reflect what genuinely excites me as an engineer today, not what I used to work on a decade ago.
Drawing a clear line in the sand allows me to close the VMware chapter with genuine appreciation and look forward with full energy to the new challenges ahead.
Thank you to everyone who followed my VMware journey over the last 13 years. I hope you will stick around for what comes next.