Another year, another Techdays !
I’m now in my train, going back home, and I’m amazed… Sincerely… this isn’t because I’m a Microsoft MVP, but I love this event. Why?
First, because it’s totally free, it means that you don’t have only IT Directory or Pre sales hanging around.
You can chat with students, with vendors obviously, with Microsoft guys (some of them are actually equals of god for me AHAHAHA –Private joke inside-), with your old (MVP) friends and with, and this is the most important, with people who actually use daily the stuff you know and which is good is the fact that they are not Microsoft groupies, but when it works, or when you helped them solving a problem they say it to you, BUT when this is not working you have nowhere to hide and THAT is good, because you can discuss about the problem, try to fix it and why not continue the resolution after by email. I love this part, because during sessions you are here to show something which is good but not enough in my opinion.
Second, because we are all geek, and besides Microsoft stuff (trust me most sessions are about) you can find gems. Actually it’s always a pleasure to participate to sessions like Coding 4 Fun, Geek is in da House or Malware unchained. You can have fun, and they really are fun. It’s a problem for theses who have talk at the same time, because people know about their funniness and the room are always too small.. Microsoft if you read me, please find a bigger place for this event!
Third, I mentioned the technical geek in the two previous parts, and I have to say, it’s pretty pleasant to speak in front of these guys. You can broke your demo, talk geeky, and use not always pretty vocabulary. This is what is IT, it’s fun, and I love when a talk is fun!! I love when i can laugh my ass off when the speaker miss is joke (even if it’s a success J) that’s why we are here, learn new stuff, but in a funny way. Well, actually, part 2 and 3 can be grouped.
Now let’s talk about stuff I’ve seen during 3 days. I’ve spend many time chatting with people, I’ve got to admit that. Once that said, I’ve loved the Azure automation stuff, SMA, Orchestrator, workflows, etc. DevOps term was often used, and mainly oriented for devs, but slowly, you could have attend a session called « DevOps vu par les Ops » which was great! Good Job Cellenza Guys 😉
vNext demonstrations were great too, especially the storage. You will have the possibility to build High Availability storage architectures without invest all your budget in a hardware handled one.
This year, was the Internet of Thing year, and many sessions were about that stuff, some security oriented, some other more « maker » oriented, but it’s pretty fresh in a Microsoft event to see that. This where I’m going to finish this post, but actually, the direction Microsoft took a year ago, was the good.
Microsoft is not a « Come as we want you to be » but « Come as you are! » (Credit goes to Nicolas Petit, for that). And to do that, Microsoft will have to be very very sexy to bring back people on its side, but this is in the good way.