Reflections from Experts Live Europe 2018 in Prague!

So Experts Live Europe happened 24/10-26/10, it was 3 full days packed with deep insights and knowledge that was shared in a community spirit.

400+ Attendees from 29 different countries from all the over the world, the location this year was Prague and Prague Congress center.

It was really a great “fit for purpose” location as you had everything within 5 minutes walk and it never felt crowded. (expect on the pre-conf session)

I want to early mention the nice community feeling this event is founded on, people (friends) coming together over common interest and having a couple of days fun, sharing stories, tips and trix and motivation.

@Isidora and @Marcel are the driving forces and there are certainly many others to thank.

Here are some great examples of a nice extra touch that i think shows that some extra heart went into arranging the event

  1. Christmas presents donated to Red Cross
  2. Post Card initative – the result of the initative 🙂
  3. Intro video before the keynote.

 

And also during the VIP party in the clouds we took a moment and sang happy birthay to a Speaker crossing the world to share his knowledge while his family message was displayed on all the monitors in the cloud bar 🙂

Ok so the conference content then.

Pre conference day

I attended Damian Flynns DevOps pre conf day, it was a nice guide for us heavy infrastructure experienced IT people to get started the right way with Infra as code and implement Git with version control and branching. Great discussions on business challenges with getting DevOps mentality anchored in the business and som tips on what worked for others attending.

Also great discussions on how we in the community can help eachother, writing blogs, feedback in forums etc.

General observations

In a community driven event, like Experts Live is, we talk about the challenges and technical solutions we face today, in a vendor driven event (like ignite) it is more about coming features and roadmaps. That was a feedback i heard a couple of times and a reason why they chose to come to Experts Live, it is more real world IT 🙂

On-Premises is still very much alive despite what the marketing push is saying, the biggest interest was around Client Management (SCCM). During breaks and lunches i talked to some of the attendees and some have still no need to look at Azure or any Cloud, the business needs to reside on-premises so naturally no need to look at Azure.

But still, as an IT person they expressed curiosity and had planned on attending some of the Azure only sessions.

Sessions

Looking at the sessions list and the speakers i was really impressed, so many known industry names, MVP´s, Regional Directors and so on. The combined experience covering the wast landscape of everything in Microsoft IT is pretty rare.

I am humbled, proud and happy to be on the same wall as these community contributors.

 

As always it was hard to choose sessions to go to and i had to be hard in my choices.

DevOps was covered in various formats and from different angels but it was present in many sessions, this shows that it is starting to find its place even in the infrastructure world with infra as code as the starting point.

Serverless and PaaS was also brought forward in some sessions, my own sessions where based on PaaS only solutions for example.

I attended these sessions.

  • Modern Documentation for DevOps and Cloud Native IT / Speaker – Lee Berg

Nice breakdown how you get the documentation aligned in DevOps and lots of tips and tricks.

  • How to avoid the wild-wild west in Azure with Governance / Speaker – Samuel Erskine

Samuel is funny and makes the Governance to a comedy show without losing sight of the goal.

  • Where are my Servers? – An introduction into serverless computing / Speaker – Michael Rueefli

Great intro with short history to align us on what Serverless is and then cool demos to showcase the possibilities.

This was a nice session on getting started with IoT, many tips on what to start with and think on while scaling.

Also a great story and demo that showcases the power and flexibility with Azure DevOps and Infra as code.

  • Automate everything: Bring self-service to LEGO robots / Speaker – Jakob G. Svendsen

Jakob had a great show with full circle from sharepoint, to powersapp, to Functions, to Automation to Lego Robot.

This clip is the big finale where the Robot is going 25cm and dropping an item, going 26cm = broken Robot 🙂

Nice showcase of complex bot made easy.

And my own sessions obviously 🙂

I presented 3 session.

Overall i am happy with the presentations and would have liked more feedback, maybe more feedback is coming from the evaluations.

I hope my point came across that with cloud everyone can do BigData 😉

Other fun things

ExpertsLiveTv

Cloud street Boys Rider list completion

Summary

Join the event next year! 🙂

Follow ExpertsLiveEU and other social channels as well and drop in on the site https://www.expertslive.eu/ to get info on the next time and venue.

 

//Michael

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