My name is Michael Stanclift 👨‍💻 I work for VMware 🐢 I live in Kansas 🌻 I’m married to Sadie 🦸‍♀️ Together we have three boys and one daughter 👣 I have been a Star Trek fan my entire life 🖖 I’m turning my children into Star Trek fans for life. 🩵 Much of my free time is spent on a pitch watching my children become footballers ⚽️

I’m not a perfect person there’s many things I wish I didn’t do. But I’ll continue learning. I never meant to reboot that host for you.

I’m currently the Administrator of the Mastodon instance vmst·io. This is where the bulk of my free technical efforts are directed. More information about that can be found on our documentation site.

Contacts

Other Social

Proofs

Birdsite

Because of the takeover by a right-wing billionaire, I no longer have an active account on Twitter. All of my content was deleted at the end of October 2022, and the account was deactivated permanently at the start of 2023. While I currently still own the vmstan handle there, it’s a fresh account with no content. If you see someone active there and it looks like me, it’s someone pretending to be me … which has happened on more than one occasion.

Personal Technology

The first computer I ever used was an Apple IIe. The first computer I ever owned was an IBM PS/2. I spent the early 90s to late 2000s all in on Microsoft, but beginning with the release of the iPhone 3G, I’ve swung back into the orbit of the fruit company.

Today I have mostly Apple products at my disposal for my daily computing needs.

Daily Drivers

  • Apple iPhone 15 Pro Max
  • Apple MacBook Pro M3 Max 14"
  • Apple MacBook Pro 16" Intel i9 (2019)

Certification & Experience

Corporate Overlords

Currently

I’m currently a Technical Adoption Manager for VMware focused on healthcare clients. What exactly does a TAM do? Basically whatever my customer needs me to do. I’m part-advocate, part-consultant, part-analyst, and part-therapist. It’s the best job I’ve ever had.

Please note, all opinions expressed on this blog or any of my other social media are mine, and may not reflect theirs.

As of May 2023, I have worked for VMware for five years.

Previously

Prior to VMware, I spent a year working as an Integration Engineer for a financial services and healthcare technology provider called DST Systems. As an IE, my primary function was to work directly with the company business units and help assess their infrastructure needs and design solutions for them that were consistent with the best practices established by the enterprise architecture teams. I supported our pharmacy solutions and business workflow automation groups. I put in my notice the same week a transaction to purchase them was going through, for $5.4 billion.

For six years I was a systems consultant for a value added reseller. I left a few months before they got bought. For more information see Kernel Panic.

Prior to that, I was a systems administrator for a document imaging software provider called Perceptive Software that was purchased right after I started working for them, for around $250 million. Shortly after I left they rebranded the entire operation but then bought a competitor for $1 billion dollars. Some Chinese investors bought that a couple years ago, and then divested all of the software, so my company became a separate company again, and then it was sold to a different competitor. I only worked there for a year.

For four years I was a Network Analyst for Rockhurst University which is a small Jesuit college in Kansas City. I did a bunch of crazy things there including one of the first major VMware VDI implementations in education. Wyse did a case study on it, and it won an award from ComputerWorld Magazine. Here’s the video version, where you can see a very nervous, 40 pounds lighter, 25 year old version of me explain why desktop virtualization is great.

Hosting

This site is hosted by Micro.blog. Previous iterations have run Ghost, Wordpress, and there has been data from other platforms like WriteFreely and Hugo which have been merged in through the years. There are also reposted writing from sites I’ve contributed to like Neowin, TechVirtuoso, and Petri.