Last week I had the opportunity to attend the .NET Developer Days conference in Warsaw, Poland. It was my first time to such a big conference and also my first time winning something significant such as the ticket to the conference together with all the travel expenses :D.
In iQuest (but I’m sure this happens in other companies as well) we have a contest where anybody interested in various tech conferences around the globe can participate. You just add yourself to a list of potential attendees to a specific conference and at some point the winners will be chosen during a live random.org session (usually before the event with ~1 month or so). Depending on the conference, there may be one or more colleagues chosen. Very cool, big thank you to iQuest for this!
Coming back, the conference was on 24h and 25th October from 9AM. I arrived in Warsaw on the 23rd, at noon and I hit the road to visit as much as possible of the city. I targeted the main attractions: old city center, Royal Palace (including the Rembrandt gallery), Lazienkowski Palace, Lazienki Park, Fryderyk Chopin Museum, Palace of Culture and Science. Very nice places. As always, I was unfortunate, and got a dark, cold and foggy weather + i managed to get a cold, which I am still fighting a the time I’m writing this. The other days, the weather was way better, sunny and warmer of course :). Totally worth it though!
I want to share with you all the insights I got from it: the good, the bad, the funny etc. Since this would make a huge blog post, I decided to split it in several parts (don’t know yet how many), but this is the first part of several. As I said, I want to share key ideas and other details (videos, pictures) from all the presentations I’ve attended, so stay tuned for the other parts as well to get all the details. Hopefully, I will convince you to join such a conference, as a software developer (and not only) it was a very interesting and pleasant experience.
To get a better understanding of how big it was think about the setup: having 27 speakers, 43 sessions, 2000 attendees from 40 countries => a ginormous conference!
I think they managed to pull this also due to the keynote speakers. We are talking about:
Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President at Microsoft – one of the original founders of .NET, helped lead Microsoft Azure and now he is the VP of the MS Cloud + AI
Richard Campbell – mostly known from the .NET Rocks! podcasts
Jeffrey Snover, Microsoft Technical Fellow – inventor of PowerShell, Chief Architect of Windows Server and Chief Architect of Azure Infrastructure
Pretty impressive, right? For me it was something out of this world :).
The conference was hosted by two very nice, funny and knowledgeable guys: Richard Campbell and Carl Franklin, both mostly known from the .NET Rocks! podcasts (funny story about this one in a future part). I had the honor to meet these guys live, several years ago, during a training on async and parallel programming which they hosted at one of the iQuest offices, just for us :D. Very cool way of presenting the information.
As for the setup, there were four rooms dedicated to sessions which were delivered in parallel. You can see the all the sessions below, I highlighted the ones where I joined.
Conference Schedule
Each session lasted for an hour, followed by a 20 minute break + lunch break. During the breaks, there were lots of food, snacks, sweets and drinks to choose from. There were also some sponsor booths, each having a product for showcasing and various raffles where you could win various prizes from T-Shirts to Wireless Headphones, Nintendo Switch Lite, software licenses etc.
Also, they had some xbox one’s ready with various games for attendees to enjoy. There were even custom racing seats with pedals and serious steering wheel gear for games such as F1. Other entertainment options were: two fussball tables, oversized jenga, a strike a light table and other minor stuff I can’t remember :). Anyway, there were several activites you could do during the breaks.
The food was ok (not great, not terrible, but people call me picky when it comes to food, so you can ignore this), drinks were great and plenty, going from natural juices to water, tea, coffee, beer, prosecco, red wine, white wine etc.
There was this app you could install to keep track of everything: speakers, agenda, events, notifications etc. Very helpful.
I also ran into an ex colleague of ours, Radu Vunvulea, who was there as a speaker. He is a cloud guru, if you are into cloud technologies, especially Microsoft Azure, you should really check him out on his blog.
These were all great. Now, for the not so pleasant parts, which I understood is quite common: toilets. So, for 2000 people (the vast majority proudly wearing family jewels), they had 10 toilets available for men + several urinals (under 10 urinals in total). During the breaks, everybody hit the toilets, leading to huge queues to the toilets. Not very cool, I adapted to the situation and used it 1-2 minutes after some sessions started in order not spend the break queuing at the toilet, but of course, others thought the same, but the situation was manageable.
Next, as you can imagine, after the presentations, the queues were forming at the toilets and at the drinks, coffee especially. After finishing their business at the toilet, everyone would queue to the drinks. Good thing I don’t drink coffee, but my colleague did, and he spent some time queuing.
These were the only downsides of this conference. I hope they would improve on this aspect in the future. But, despite these downsides, the content, quality, activities and THE PARTY (more on this in the next part), made me forget all about these and really, really enjoy the conference experience.
This was about it, high level overview about the conference. Details coming in the upcoming parts, so stay tuned, there is valuable info and some funny moments :).
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