Last Tuesday Campus Days was kicked off, but unfortunately I was not able to attend any sessions on Tuesday due to our youngest one teething (parents will understand). Wednesday I had my own session, right after Regis (b|l|t) and Kenneth (b|l|t) two slot session on HDInsight, Azure and Machine Learning. It’s always fun to be presenting in a movie Theater, as the screen simply doesn’t get much bigger – see Big Screen Selfie 🙂
At my session on Power BI Visualization Wednesday there was a fairly good attendance – somewhere around 45 people turned up, and once we got started the questions began to trickled in. I guess a lot of the IT people at this diverse conference are currently thinking about Power BI, unfortunately not doing so much Power BI. It was rather clear that this audience wasn’t the usual BI gang that already knew most of the stuff, and I think I did accommodate for that in my presentation. The final score of 5.63 I am very happy with since it’s an improvement over last year. Next year will be even better, yeah? At least there is room for improvement
Thursday I attended two sessions, one on Microsoft Release Manager by Philip Haugaard MSFT, an old classmate of mine, and one on making the Business ready for mobile with Windows 8.1. The latter due to some requirements that has come up at Work, and I had hoped to get some answers in that session. One bonus info from the last session was about Project Sienna – a prototyping Tool by Microsoft I didn’t know about. Check it out here: http://apps.microsoft.com/windows/en-us/app/microsoft-project-siena/5ae47651-e8f3-4e41-aab7-e19ab1b80180
Socially the event was OK, but not great. Wednesday two movies were shown, Dumb & Dumber 2 and Codebreaker. I should have selected Codebreaker I guess. D&D2 was funny in some parts, but the story is really thin (thinner than expected). After the movies, the hall was converted into American 20’ies. Whiskey bar and several food stations, burger, crab cake, rib-eye and apple pie was served along with beers. A lot of buzz was going on, and I think the attendees were having a great time.
I really like the Campus Days event, mainly because of the diversity of the people attending. The sessions are just as diverse, and you can really tweak your learning by attending some sessions outside your own comfort zone – as a presenter you benefit as well, as you get to see IT-Pros outside your segment perform their sessions, that can be a good learning experience as well.
Hopefully Campus Days will be back next year, and hopefully I will get the opportunity to submit sessions and present again at this event.
