After a quiet few pandemic years with no in-person events and the arrival of twins, my in-person presentation activity was minimal. My activity has started to increase, and there have been plenty of recent events and more are scheduled for the near future.
The Recent Past
Experts Live Netherlands 2024
It was great to return to The Netherlands to present at Experts Live Netherlands. Many European IT workers know the Experts Live brand; Isidora Maurer (MVP) has nurtured & shepherded this conference brand over the years, starting with a European-wide conference and then working with others to branch it out to localised events that give more people a chance to attend. I presented at this event a few years ago but personal plans prevented me from submitting again until this year. And I was delighted to be accepted as a speaker.
Hosted in Nieuwegein, just a short train ride from Schiphol airport in Amsterdam (Dutch public transport is amazing) the conference featured a packed expo hall and many keen attendees. I presented my “Azure Firewall: The Legacy Firewall Killer” session to a standing-room-only room.
TechMentor Microsoft HQ 2024
The first conference I attended was WinConnections 2004 in Lake Las Vegas. That conference changed my career. I knew that TechMentor had become something like that – the quality of the people I knew who were presenting at the event in the past was superb. I had the chance to submit some sessions this time around and was happy to have 3 accepted, including a pre-conference all-day seminar.
I worked my tail off on that “pre-con”. It’s an expansion of one of my favourite sessions that many events are scared of, probably because they think it’s too niche or too technical: “Routing – The Virtual Cabling of Secure Azure Networking”. Expanding a 1 hour session to a full day might seem daunting but I had to limit how much content I included! Plus I had to make this a demo session. I worked endless hours on a Bicep deployment to build a demo lab for the attendees. This was necessary because it would take too long to build by hand. I had issues with Azure randomly failing and with version stuff changing inside Microsoft. As one might expect, the demo gods were not kind on the day and I quickly had to pivot from hands-on labs to demos. While the questions were few during the class, there were lots of conversations during the breaks and even on the following days.
My second session was “Azure Firewall: The Legacy Firewall Killer” – this is a popular session. I like doing this topic because it gives me a chance to crack a few jokes – my family will groan at that thought!
My final session was the one that I was most worried about. “Your Azure Migration Project Is Doomed To FAIL” was never accepted by any event before. I think the title might seem negative but it’s meant to be funny. The content is based on my experience dealing with mid-large organisations who never quite understand the difference between cloud migration and cloud adoption. I explain this through several fictional stories. There is liberal use of images from Unsplash and opportunities to make some laughter. This have been the session that I was least confident in, but it worked.
TechMentor puts a lot of effort into mixing the attendees and the presenters. On the first night, attendees and presenters went to a local pizza place/bar and sat in small booths. We had to talk to each other. The booth that I was at featured people from all over the USA with different backgrounds. People came and went, but we talked and were the last to leave. On the second day, lunch was an organised affair where each presenter was host to a table. Attendees could grab lunch and sit with a presenter to discuss what was on their minds. I knew that migrations were a hot topic. And I also knew that some of those attendees were either doing their first migration or first re-attempt at a migration. I was able to tune my session a tiny bit to the audience and it hit home. I think the best thing about this was the attention I saw in the room, the verbal feedback that I heard just after the session, and the folks who came up to talk to me after.
A Break
I brought my family to the airport the day before I flew to TechMentor. They were going to Spain for 4 weeks and I joined them a few days later after a l-o-n-g Seattle-Las Angeles-Dublin-Alicante journey (I really should have stayed one extra night in Seattle and taken the quicker 1-hop via Iceland).
33+ Celsius heat, sunshine, a pool, a relaxed atmosphere in a residential town (we didn’t go to a “hotel town”) was a great place to work for a week and then do two weeks of vacation.
I went running most mornings, doing 5-7KMs. I enjoy getting up early in places like this, picking a route to explore on a map, and hitting the streets to discover the locality and places to go with my family. It’s so different to home where I have just two routes with footpaths that I can use.
Coming home was a shock. Ireland isn’t the sunniest or the warmest place in the world, but it feels like mid-winter at the moment. I think I acclimatised to Spain as much as a pasty Irish person can. This morning I even had to put a jacket on and do a couple of KMs to wait for my legs to warm up before picking up the pace.
Upcoming Events
There are three confirmed events coming up:
Nieuwegein (Netherlands) September 11: Azure Fest 2025
I return to this Dutch city in a few days to do a new session “Azure Virtual Network Manager”. I’ve been watching this product develop since the private preview. It’s not quite ready (pricing is hopefully being fixed) but it could be a complete game changer for managing complex Azure networks for secure/compliant PaaS and IaaS deployments. I’ll discuss and demo the product, sharing what I like and don’t like.
Dublin (Ireland) October 7: Microsoft Azure Community & AI Day
Organised by Nicolas Chang (MVP) this event will feature a long list of Irish MVPs discussing Azure and AI in a rapid-fire set of short sessions. I don’t think that the event page has gone live yet so watch out for it. I will be presenting the “Azure Virtual Network Manager” again at this event.
TBA: Nordics
I’ve confirmed my speaking slots for 2 sessions at an event that has not publicly announced the agenda yet. I look forward to heading north and sharing some of my experiences.
My Sessions
If you are curious, then you can see my Sessionize public profile here, which is where you’ll see my collection of available sessions.
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