The second day of MVP Summit 2016 started with a bit of a rushed breakfast down in the Hyatt lobby with some fellow MVPs. I was wondering whether I should bring my laptop or not to our offsite meetings today, but I decided to lug the bag with us and get down to join folks for the buses. It was about 8am, probably shouldn’t run up to the hotel room. Although, the “depart at 8am” must surely have meant congregate at 8am, right?
Like many of the MVPs who travelled to New Orleans this year, the trip began in the wee early hours of the morning. A 3:30am alarm gets me up and ready for the 4:00am taxi to the airport with a driver who thankfully understood I had no desire to chat at this hour of the morning and silently got me where I needed to go while I zoned out in the back.
After some hiccups trying to get my boarding tickets, I finally had what I needed and got through security just in time to grab a quick bite and start boarding. My colleague, great boss, and fellow MVP, @GlenMcInnis chats with me a bit while we wait to board and then we find our seats and get ready for the excitement.
For those of you that have been following my series on the ALM sessions at the end of January in Redmond, Microsoft has posted the videos from the summit over on Channel9.
I’ve updated my own posts to include video links, so if you prefer to read through the posts and then click through to the video, you can now do that:
Or, if you’d prefer to search yourself, go directly to the Channel9 ALM Summit 3 videos: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/ALM-Summit/ALM-Summit-3
The conference is all done, and I’m finally home from Seattle wishing there was more, but also really wanting to get back into the office and share what I’ve learned.
I met some incredible people this week, and had some great conversations around the breakfast table, over beers, and in the hotel shuttle rides. I am really going to miss that warm weather, even if it was always raining, because it’s some 20-30 degrees colder back at home right now.
Like the rest of the days, Day Three started with a breakfast followed by a keynote. We were not disappointed… 
Continue reading “ALM Summit: Day Three”
Wow, day two is in the books… where to start? Well, maybe I’ll start at the end: Free beer and buffet for over 3 hours definitely provided a nice finish to the end of the day. I didn’t network the way I imagine I was probably supposed to: milling around the room and trying to make contacts. Instead, I sat with two great guys (both from Canada) in a booth and talked about stuff while we drank and ate for several hours. Enough about that, though, what about the sessions?
I’ve never been to a conference like this before, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. The conference kicked off Tuesday at the Microsoft Conference Center in Redmond, which is a beautiful building, even if I’ve only seen the conference rooms on the bottom floor so far 🙂 The start-time for registration said 7:30am and it was running all day along with an Expo Reception that wrapped up at 8pm, so I was prepared for a very grueling day, but it turned out to be some of the most fun I’ve had talking shop with other industry folks.
I attended sessions from a mix of the DevOps, Agile Development, and ALM Leadership tracks. I won’t go into detail on every single thing said in these sessions, especially because the videos will surface in a few weeks and I can just link to them then, but here are a few highlights and notes from the sessions I was able to attend.
