Last year I had an opportunity to speak at several conferences. When I look back at all the events, I see that I really was very busy!
The year started with a trip to Belgrade, Serbia in April. I gave a talk, “DBA in the Cloud,” at the Tarabica conference, where I spoke about Azure SQL Databases, comparing them to on-site MS SQL Servers. I have attended Tarabica many times and I really enjoy it. It’s a community conference and gives speakers a chance to really connect with their audience.
Next up was the MS Network 7 in Neum, BiH. This conference is my “home base,” so to say, because this is where I gave my first conference presentation a few years ago. The organizers did a great job with the 2017 edition and organized one of the best conferences I’ve ever attended. I gave three presentations, two as a solo speaker and one as a member of a panel. I spoke about Open Source on Azure (during the “Linux on Azure” session) and Azure networking (during the “Microsoft Azure Networking: Everything You Need to Know” session).
April was a busy month and it finished with another conference, WinDays 17, in Porec, Croatia. This time I spoke about Open Source on Azure, during the “Linux on Azure” session.
After a busy April, I took some time off from conference speaking and the next event on my schedule was Azure Saturday in Munich, Germany. It was the event’s debut and I was happy to be selected as a speaker. My session, “Azure Stack – Transform Your Data Center to Azure,” went well and I spoke to a full room. I talked about Azure Stack’s offering, how to deploy Azure Stack SDK to your local data center and the future of Azure Stack.
After the summer break, my September tour started with Kulendayz in Osijek, Croatia. This is another community conference and one that I enjoy participating in. I spoke about Open Source and Azure in my session, “Linux on Azure.” It was interesting that the session was livestreamed and available online for free.
The 6th Annual MS Community BiH Conference also took place in September. I was on home turf in Sarajevo, BiH! I participated in two sessions, “DBA in the Cloud” and “Introduction to Azure DevTest Lab.” This is another community conference (you’ve probably noticed by now that I enjoy these kinds of events!). At such conferences you get the feeling that people are there to learn and it gives you a chance to speak in smaller rooms and to have more interaction with the audience.
My last event in September was also my biggest speaking achievement to date, the MS Ignite 2017 in Orlando, Florida. This is Microsoft’s biggest conference, with over a thousand sessions and more than 30,000 attendees. I was proud to be selected to speak at such an event and I couldn’t really believe it was actually happening until I finally got there! During the “MS Ignite” session, I delivered my presentation, “Azure Networking Inside and Out,” which talked about Azure networking, how to set up site-to-site connections to the cloud and extend your data center to Azure. The session went incredibly well, with far more people wanting to attend than the room could accommodate.
October started with UC and Cloud Day 2017 in Birmingham, UK. This was my first trip to the UK and my first time attending this conference. I was amazed by the speakers they gathered and was proud to be among those selected. I spoke again about Azure networking, and I guess this was a popular topic for 2017 because I spoke to another full room.
After Birmingham, I attended MS Sinergija 17 in Belgrade, Serbia. I spoke about Azure during their “Open Source” session (again, the number of times I delivered this presentation in 2017 shows how popular a topic it must have been that year).
In November, I made my first trip to Moscow, Russia for the DevOps Pro Moscow 2017 conference, where I delivered a pre-conference workshop, “Azure for Continuous Delivery,” and two sessions on the day of the conference. The first session was “Introduction to Azure DevTest Lab” and the second was an open session, where we discussed the future of DevOps and the cloud.
The year ended with a bang, with my first keynote address. I was honored by Advanced Technology Days (in Zagreb, Croatia), as they selected me to be part of the 2017 keynote session. I spoke about Azure Data’s offering and the new Open Source solutions Microsoft provides in this area. In addition to my keynote address, I gave another talk, “Azure Networking Inside and Out.”
So, in summary: 11 conferences, 15 sessions and 1 keynote address. As I said at the beginning, 2017 was a very busy year. Plans are already underway for 2018 – this one may be even busier than the last!