My CloudCred Team
CloudCred, What is it You Ask?
Well CloudCred is a website from VMware that anyone can join in at to more or less “compete” against other virtualization adopters in Team or Individual rankings. VMware says it like this on the site: “to build your cloud expertise, establish your cloud credentials and show off your cloud computing skills. Players tackle individual tasks, team tasks or team challenges to build their Cloud Cred score and earn rewards“.
Well I have been on the site since June 10th of 2013 and when I joined I was auto-magicly added to a random team with 15 other folks like myself. I did a few tasks such as “Share a VMware blog post on Twitter”, “Download a trail of this software and tell us your thoughts” and thought it was OK and a cool deal to maybe learn a few things here & there. My points for each task were helping me move up the list of 15 players to the top. Then one day while in the site I noticed that VMware was giving away gift for participation in tasks, these gifts were nice (the big ones that is)! A trip to VMworld 2013, an Xbox, wow pretty cool stuff. I then quickly transformed into competition mode, game on, I am going for a prize while picking up some “CloudCred” and know-how.
Days passed and I started to realize that I was the only one on my team actually doing tasks anymore. 99% of the team had stopped participating months ago, how odd I thought. Did they die? Did that just not care? Or were they just…Sleeping? In any case, I took it upon myself to revamp this team of one and do as many tasks as one person could (since some tasks require other players help). My goal was to bring this team up the rankings and put myself in the #1 slot for my team.
I started this process by renaming the team from some random cloud name to its current name, The Sleeping Cloud, which I felt was super fitting since all other players fell asleep! I quickly made my way to the top spot within a week or so of doing individual tasks. Then one day I get a Tweet from a guy on my team! HOLY CRAP, another member is ALIVE! Matt Heldstab from Wisconsin was not only a team member but wanted to actually complete tasks! WOOHOOO!
Matt and I quickly started chatting via Twitter and worked to gain points for ourselves and the team. Shortly after that week our team was blasting through the rankings becoming one of the top 3 teams to score points in a 7 day span at one point. I quickly recruited my long time friend and fellow VCP, Anton Major from NJ to our team since I knew he was, 1 alive, and 2 willing to participate. Anton has been busy since joining and we are cutting him some slack as he joins up with a new firm this week as a Technical Architect working on some great projects. Once he gets settled, best believe I will be on him to gain more points! LETS GO!
Our team started out somewhere in the 200-300 range of ranked teams out of 738 total teams on the site. Today we are ranked 33rd out of 738 teams! Individually I am ranked 191st, Matt is ranked 161st (YES, Matt has stolen my top ceed in the team), and Anton is ranked 1217th (Cut the boy some slack! He will be back soon) out of thousands of other vNerds.
Bottom line…My Team RULES!