A couple months ago I was sitting at my desk when the familiar sound of a new email broke my distraction from the task at hand. Occasionally Does Not Compute gets emails from publicists asking for guest time on our show so I quickly ignored it, but it wasn’t until a second glance about a week later that I realized that we had been invited to Ignite 2019 to make some podcasts!
Uncertainty
At first I wasn’t sure if I wanted to attend or not. While it was awesome to be invited, I felt like a really small fish in a really big pond. Up until August of this year I hadn’t ever been to any tech conferences, with Elixir Conf 2019 being my first. Elixir Conf was a really great introduction to tech conferences because it was fairly intimate in size and was focused purely on Elixir and its ecosystem, a topic that I'm already familiar with. Compare that to Ignite, which has more than 25,000 (some reports say as many as 40,000) attendees and more than 1,000 sessions about topics ranging from Microsoft's various business enterprise offerings to cloud services like Azure to tools like Blazor. Ignite has never really been a developer focused conference, and if I’m reading reports correctly, 2019 is the first year where they’ve decided to add more developer related tracks. Additionally, I’ve never personally been a Microsoft customer outside of the occasional gaming PC that happens to run Windows, and I've certainly never really considered any of Azure's offerings for Design Kollective or any of my side projects.
After some reflection on what I got out of Elixir Conf and some coaxing from Richard Campbell I decided to put all that behind me and embrace the uncertainty. Richard helped us narrow into topics that Rockwell and I are interested in and worked to setup some interviews for the show with some guests working on some pretty cool things!
Topics of Interest
I've managed to narrow the 1987 activites listed on the Ignite site down to the following topics:
- Blazor (C# compilation Web Assembly)
- Visual Studio Code
- PWA’s on Windows
- Transforming the way Retailers do business online
- Web App Development for Everyone
- GitHub and Azure DevOps
- Balancing family and Career - Can you have it all?
- Building Server-less Applications in Azure
There are many other topics that I'd be interested in as well, but I'm trying to remember that my time and attention are limited!
Personal Goals
So what am I hoping to get out of Ignite 2019? In a broad sense, I’m really hoping to expand my horizons. From a CTO perspective, I’ve never really been a customer of Microsoft’s cloud offerings, but part of my job at Design Kollective is to keep an eye out for new tools and services that could make us a more efficient business. From a podcasting perspective, I’m hoping to be a part of some quality content that hopefully helps others along their tech journey. From a personal perspective, I would really love to make some new friends and meet more people that are outside of the online saas business world.
In Closing
Again, A huge thanks goes out to Richard for listening to Does Not Compute and reaching out to us. When I started DNC with Paul back in 2015 I just wanted to talk tech with a friend, and I never dreamed that through it I'd have opportunities to travel and meet new people like this.
Also, if you happen to run into Rockwell or me (Does Not Compute is printed on our badges), please say hi - We’d love to talk with you!
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