Ray O’farrell opens the last general session of VMworld 2015, like previous VMworld’s the last day’s general session is taken up with TED talks. I’ve found previous sessions fascinating and therefore looked forward to seeing the topics covered:

Fei-Fei Li, Director of the Stanford Articfical Intellegence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab – talked about teaching computers how to see.

Greg Gage, Founder of the Backyard Brains Neuroscientist, Engineer and TED Senior Fellow – who measured fireing neurons in a disected insect and went onto recording the neurons that action a person moving their arm and played them back on another person.

David Eagleman, Director, Laboratory for Perception and Action, Baylor College of Medicine, Guggenheim Fellow, Best Selling Author, Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain – this was fascinating stuff, about individuals who are deaf, blind etc using sensory input from other senses to compensate for the loss of that one sense. It was amazing to hear about how the brain processes data and using this ability individuals can harness other sensory input (light, sound, vibration, taste) to be able to see or hear.

It was then a case of watching the last vBrownBag sessions at the Hang Space, here’s the completed lineup, I recommend you take some time out to watch some of these TechTalks as there’s some great content here:

http://professionalvmware.com/2015/08/vbrownbag-techtalks-schedule-vmworld-usa-2015/

This was followed by shopping for some presents for my Family and then saying goodbye/fairwell with @jpwarren and @demitassenz oh and not forgetting Blue Cow! Then it was off to the Airport with the help of Uber.

And so another VMworld comes to an end, I just wanted to finish by providing some brief observations of my last week, it’s been a privilege to once again catchup with this community, this year’s VMworld was all about the merging of Infrastructure and Development, there was a big emphasis on bringing the developer community into the VMware fold and provide the means to engage these people the same way VMware have included Networking professionals in the virtualisation conversation.

My big takeaway for this event is to better understand DevOps, Automation and the changes these new ways of dealing with infrastructure will have for enterprises.

Thanks for following this blog series over the last few days, I hope it provided some insight into what goes on at VMworld and why this community is still the best!

Just as a quick follow up I wanted to include my steps for the event, I averaged around 15,214 steps per day over the 6 days – so not only is the event great for networking it’s also great for your health 🙂