My second (ish) professional conference. I was lucky enough to attend Microsoft Build and learn that I am way behind in my knowledge and grasp of current technologies. I am probably naively thinking I am not too far behind, but I’ve got to start the catching-up process at some point…preferably now.

This post will be a mix of mostly vacation text (sightseeing) and a little bit of conference text as I like to log my travels outside of the local area. Plus, I was in desperate need of a trip/vacation away from home, family, and work as I could tell the feeling of burn out was starting.

Day 1 (Tues, 5/9)
I traveled with a large group of coworkers (7, including myself). We met up at the airport and flew out on the 1:30pm flight and arrived around 4pm. I held out on getting lunch before the flight because my boss had the magic money card. I saw him while waiting, waved, and watched as he turned around and went off to get lunch with my old lead. The rest of us were SOL. I did text him, but he had forgotten to put my number in his phone the last time he texted me, so it went ignored. I was lucky I brought snack bars. Just in case.

On the plane, I tried to get a nap in and managed to doze, but ended up trying to make a bigger dent in Cryptonomicon. I quietly observed my mentor helping an older lady to the lavatory and back to her seat. He came back telling me she had multiple sclerosis. My mentor (who I know will probably read this) has made me more mindful of the way I can be a better person. From the stories he’s told me and the actions I’ve seen, I have a ways to go. I’m working on it, though.

I learned, among other things, I shouldn’t follow my old lead around because he tends to miss signs. At the Seattle airport, while making our way to the car rental, we ended up crossing the bridge to the parking structure before my old lead realized he was going the wrong way. We turned around and eventually made it to the shuttle stop. We were lucky to not have to wait for the next shuttle. We grabbed our rental van, loaded it up, and went to our hotel – Inn at the Market.

I got a nice room on the 8th floor with a wonderful view of .. buildings. It wasn’t that bad, but the premium rooms were on the other side, with a view of the port. Plus, I didn’t have a street lamp shining in my window, loud neighbors, or anything that would make my nights unpleasant. After unpacking some things and shouldering my backpack for a venture in the city, I went back to the lobby to meet up with my coworkers.

We walked the half mile to the Washington State Convention Center (WSCC) and checked in to the conference. My first pieces of swag were a couple of Microsoft Build 2017 stickers, a Microsoft Build 2017 t-shirt (I’m curious if the design will stay or start peeling off), souvenir speaker schedule, Seattle Chocolates chocolate bar, and a Starbucks gift card. Oh, and a badge. Can’t forget that.

I was the only one to bring a backpack as everyone else apparently expected to be given a bag. Clearly pretending to attend my cousin’s conferences paid off as she carried her backpack everywhere. We trekked back to hotel so everyone could drop off their swag. I found that there was turn-down service and was given two more pieces of Seattle Chocolates. Being slightly paranoid about leaving laptops and valuables in hotel rooms, I was glad I brought my backpack with me.

Then, it was back out for dinner with my coworkers. We were primarily following my boss around as he had the card. The two places we tried getting food at turned out to have 2 hour waits and a few of us were starving, having skipped lunch. We got lucky with the third – Pike Place Bar and Grill. A low rating on Yelp, but when you’re hungry and don’t want to wait 2 hours, the food is not bad. We munched on an appetizer plate of calamari (very chewy, not the best). I had the crab cake burger, which was pretty good. A few coworkers had the surf and turf, and they were also happy with their dishes.

After dinner, we went on a Target run to grab some bottled water and other necessities (like beer and chips). There were very strong pockets of weed being smoked as we walked around downtown. And a lot of homeless people. But, we made it out and back to the hotel safely.

My old lead mentioned there was a rooftop garden and invited us to join him there as he wanted to have some beer before calling it a night. My boss offered to bring the beer he bought. I was more interested in this garden.

It turned out to just have some planters, but had a nice view of the port. I hung out for a little bit, taking pictures of the scenery, and remembering to call home. It was about 9pm then, the sun had already set, but it was just barely getting dark. A long dusk. I went back up to my room just after 9pm to shower, finish unpacking and repacking what I wanted to bring with me to the conference the next day, and turning in.

Day 2 (Wed, 5/10)
The best thing about this trip is I could finally sleep in. Except, I tend not to sleep in as much as I expect and was up at 5:30 partly out of habit and partly because I wasn’t entirely comfortable in the different surroundings. So I went over the speaker schedule again, trying to figure out which sessions would benefit me the most and realizing there were too many and not enough.

I’m at a weird transition where my foundation is web-based, but I’ve dabbled in embedded systems and it’s fun to turn a LED light on and off (running joke at IoT talks). There wasn’t a lot of plain .NET/.NET Core talks, but there were a lot of Azure and IoT talks.

Around 6:40, I went downstairs to make a quick stop at the rooftop view to take some pictures and give home a call, then down to the lobby to make use of the Starbucks machine. I made myself a hot chocolate to sip on while waiting for the others for breakfast and kept studying the schedule, hoping some divine inspiration would light up the sessions for me. It didn’t happen. But my coworkers did show up and we decided to go to The Crumpet Shop for breakfast.

We learned that it was a family business, founded by the father and looked like the son was running the customer side and actually preparing the crumpets. I went with a egg and salmon cream cheese crumpet with a small latte on the side. It was a pretty good breakfast. If I’m in the area again, I’d have to try a different crumpet. I also saw that they had loose leaf teas for sale, but wasn’t sure where they were sourced from.

After we were all fed and watered, we walked up to the convention center. I noted the homeless guy asking about two women’s names. I don’t remember them now, but something like “Beth or Judy?” and he kept repeating it. He moved in my direction and I moved to get out of his way and sort of listened as he asked my boss the same question and my boss humored him by saying “Beth”. My mentor, boss, and I laughed a little at the strangeness.

We then stood in a huge line for the keynote. Donuts were supplied! Not that I needed any… as I gained 3lb while on the trip and am still trying to shed that weight. But still. We went in a weird zig-zag pattern as doors were opened on the right, then closed on the right, sending us back to the left.

We barely made it in to the main room. On the way, I noticed there was a women’s lounge and made a note to revisit at a later point. Our group of 7 got split as I, once again, followed my old lead. My mentor was right next to me with the rest. My old lead was trying to get seats in a special area, but realized we couldn’t sit there and turned around. So I latched on to his backpack when I couldn’t locate the rest of the group. I learned that some of the others were sent to an overflow room.

3-hour keynote speech. My boss likened it to a 3-hour infomercial. I thought it was a little more interesting as some of the relevant announcements were exciting enough to me, like IoT Edge and CLI in Azure. I was also amused to see a video about Project Emma, which I had seen previously, but I still can’t recall from where. Very touching and inspiring.

After the keynote and herding us back out, I split from my old lead as he went to go stand in line for the men’s bathroom and I just walked into the women’s. Very much reminiscent of Blizzcon. I somehow managed to run back into my mentor and boss and followed them to my first session on IoT, as I couldn’t decide on which one to go to.

I realized very early that I could hear what was being discussed and had a vague notion of how the pieces fit together because we had previously had a day’s worth of IoT training, but I really had no clue how we could leverage all of the new features. My mind was churning with possibilities and perhaps this new IoT Edge would help answer one of our issues with latency, etc. But I really just needed to do a Hello World equivalent with IoT and solidify the foundations in my mind.

After that session was lunch. Racks of brown bags were provided and the workers were trying to shuttle people through quickly, saying to grab a bag and all bags were the same. I later learned the Clif bars supplied were not the same as I got peanut butter and my mentor got chocolate chip. The meal was a tiny chicken and rice/noodle or beef and rice/noodle combination box with a side of Clif bar, a cuties orange, and a couple of shortcake cookies. The food was edible, but nothing to write home about. My boss and I were complaining that for an expensive conference ($2200+/ticket), the food could have used some work.

I was hoping The Hub (vendor booths) would be less populated with people out at lunch. I separated from my boss and mentor to wander around. I was more than a little overwhelmed with the people and the experience, so I didn’t really stop and talk, just made a couple of circuits around taking notes of who was where. I eventually made my way back out to snap a quick picture of the live musician playing some weird instrument and my boss found me.

We ended up separating again because I wanted to go to a .NET Core 2.0 talk and he wanted to go to a talk about Bots. The other manager had scheduled a meeting for us with Microsoft to discuss Azure (BYOQ – bring your own questions .. except we were informed of this arrangement just a couple days prior), which involved leaving the session early. Scott Hanselman is a fun speaker and I was sad to have to leave early.

But maybe that was a good thing because they had afternoon snacks stocked and no lines! I also saw my old lead sitting outside of the meeting room I was in, so we grabbed a couple of Seattle nut and fruit snack packs, eyed the fruit and cakes, then made our way downstairs to the meeting spot.

My mentor met up with us showing me the spinners he got at his talk and was generous enough to run across the street with me to the other conference building, awkwardly enter the conference room, snag a couple more boxes of spinners, and walk out the back door. My boss calling me at that exact moment made it a little less awkward.

We met up with the rest, including coworkers from the Texas office, and had a nice hour-long chat with the Microsoft guys. My walking around The Hub paid off as a company was mentioned and they weren’t sure if they were at the conference, but I had seen their booth and their name was memorable enough.

My old lead wanted to do some sightseeing as the rest of our visit was going to be rainy. We had already agreed to go to the Sky View Observatory at the Columbia Tower, the question was when. We managed to convince our software architect to skip the later sessions and come with us. He thought we were going to the Space Needle the whole time. Turns out the convention center was actually on the way to the Columbia Tower, but we ended up going back to the hotel and back out. Extra walking is good.

I was generally surprised at the lack of “invasive” security. When I was in Chicago, we had to go through a metal detector and send our bags through the x-ray machine at The Sky Deck. Thinking we might have to go through the same, I left my stuff in the hotel (turndown service had not yet come). While waiting for the rest of the group to join in the lobby, I went with my boss to make a reservation at one of the restaurants across the street. They still couldn’t seat us until 8:30!

The Sky View Observatory was a nice place, though getting up there was a little confusing. Our group of 8 ended up getting split up again as my old lead, boss, and a couple of coworkers didn’t notice when we crossed the street. After we backtracked to try to get them, we ended up just letting each other know we’d meet at the tower. We took one elevator up to the 40th floor, had to get out, and walk around to another set of elevators that we could take up to the observatory. (My old lead got confused when we were leaving.)

It wasn’t crowded. The view was really nice. I learned that it was twice the height of the Space Needle. Through the haze, we could sort of see the mountains. We could definitely see across the sound and my boss handwaved and said Redmond was somewhere over there. There was a cafe/bar inside and some of my coworkers had a beer while enjoying the sights or their smartphones.

My coworkers didn’t want to wait until 8:30 for dinner, so they found a Thai restaurant (Noi) on the way back. After my old lead insisted we were going the wrong way and eventually splitting up with us and taking our boss with him, we met back up on the street where the restaurant was supposed to be, but we couldn’t find it for a good five minutes.

Turns out it was not directly on the street, but just off of it. The signage was blocked by the buildings that were on the street. We also passed an interesting 1000 spirits bar which had a long set of windows through which we could see .. 1000 bottles!

The food was good. I was surprised they had khao soi and had to try it. It’s been too long since I’ve had the “authentic” one in Thailand so I can’t compare. I asked our waitress if it was good and was given an emphatic yes (I’ve had khao soi that’s not great). There was an interesting “angry ocean” dish which one of my coworkers tried. I was more amused that half of the plate was the seafood, the other half was a very pretty fruit carving. Definitely a place to visit again.

Afterward, we made a short detour to the pier. I’m not sure if it has a special name, but there was a Ferris wheel and some other attractions. I got sidetracked with the monuments and statues, learning that they were planning to build a walkway that reminded me of San Francisco’s Pier 39. There was even a window display of a totem that was in the middle of being carved.

By the time I walked out to the pier, there were four of us left–my mentor, old lead, boss, and myself–as the rest peeled off to go back to the hotel at various points. On our walk back, my old lead humored a homeless guy begging for money, then directed him to my boss, realized what he had done, and gave the guy a couple of bucks. I don’t think my boss was very impressed, but did appreciate that my old lead took responsibility of the situation. Definitely not a city I’d want to wander around alone, especially not at night.

It was pretty late (okay, by my standards, around 9pm is late) by the time we finally got back, after passing the hotel and doubling back. I went up to my room, showered and crawled into bed. I survived my first day at a ginormous conference.

Day 3 (Thur, 9/11)
I managed to sleep in a little more, but was still up before 6. I went down a little early to brew myself a little coffee with the fancy Starbucks machine and go over the day’s speaker schedule. Again, couldn’t decide what to go to.

Breakfast was suggested to us by the front desk (Lowell’s) and turned out to be over our allotted budget. We paid more for the view of the waterfront than the food. The serving size was much less than Denny’s. I was frankly surprised at the amount two eggs over-medium gave me, which was to say, quite small. I wonder if they are eggs from free-range chickens or some fancy/healthy thing like that.

We met up with the rest of the group who didn’t want to join us for breakfast and trekked over to the convention center. We got split up again, but this time I was with my boss, mentor, and a coworker. The line for the keynote session was considerably smaller this time. And there were muffins! I snagged one as we walked in and another afterward.

The second keynote definitely felt like an infomercial to me. I actually started reading Wired’s live tweet of the event as it was considerably more interesting than the keynote itself. The only bonus was watching the Cirque du Soleil show architects working with the HoloLens to collaborate on a stage. I think the remote feature of virtually “bringing in” an architect who was in Europe was staged, but interesting nonetheless.

I spent a good amount of that day in that group as we moved from session to session with a lunch break in the middle. We managed to walk in the right direction and I got a ninja cat sticker as part of the Fluent Design announcement.

I was becoming more and more convinced I was very behind in my knowledge and grasp of the basics. I was being pounded by new features left and right and it felt like it was going in one ear and out the other. I had already forgotten what the feature of Cosmos DB was (I later watched a recorded breakout session to refresh my memory). I was questioning what the draw of Azure Functions was and what “serverless” meant. I couldn’t figure out what problems that solution would be appropriate for. I felt quite overwhelmed.

Lunch was a nice respite from attending talks about how to go serverless and more info about IoT. It seemed like the food was slowly getting better. Lunch was a more hearty rice burrito with chicken pieces here and there, couscous (?) salad, cantaloupe and cucumber salad, a Kind bar, and a chocolate cookie. We actually stuck around long enough this time to grab the afternoon snack boxes and enjoy them! There were a few options for the protein boxes and I went with the “bistro box” (hard boiled egg, local Toma cheese, crackers, almonds, dried apricots, coffee brownie). In retorspect, the “garden fruit & veggie” box had actual vegetables that I should have gotten, but I didn’t want to deal with the hummus.

My coworker left, wanting to have time to herself and rest her brain. In her place, we found our software architect and went to the next talk with him. He stuck around for another talk while we decided to head back to the hotel to prep for the attendee party at Century Link Field.

It was a toss-up as to whether we’d go or not because of the weather. My old lead was pushing to go the day before, but as soon as he saw the weather, he decided to just have dinner at a restaurant across the street. My mentor was willing to go with me and I convinced my boss and coworker to go. Besides, how often will you get to party with Microsoft?

It was drizzling a bit when we got to the field. Before figuring out how to go inside, we enjoyed a little bit of the live band and talked about which food stall we wanted to go to. Since it was drizzling, we ended up bypassing the outside options and sampled from a bunch of shops inside–banh mi, Vietnamese noodle salad, pulled pork sandwich, mac n cheese, clam chowder, corn on the cob, mini chicken corndogs, chicken tacos, and nachos. I was so stuffed.

After we had our fill, we made our way down to the field, which was covered with those interlocking plastic mats. Not sure if it was meant to protect the grass, or if they were still growing the grass and didn’t want people trampling the seedlings. The info about the party said they weren’t going to allow beer on the field to protect the grass, but turns out there was another station serving beer out there. I felt bad telling my boss he had to finish his beer before we could go out.

The drizzle had stopped by the time we went to the field. It was actually kind of nice to walk around. There were inflatable tackle things set up and people kicking field goals and soccer goals. We almost got hit by some soccer balls. Supposedly there were Seahawks alumni around, but not being a huge football fan, I wasn’t too crazy about that. I was most interested in seeing the fishmongers and attendees throwing and catching fish. I had no interest in smelling like fish on the way back home, so I had fun watching and recording some videos.

We went back inside to watch the other area set up for a band to play. I missed the dueling pianos, but we watched a little bit of the “rockaraoke”. I saw people walking around with purple plastic cups that said Visual Studio on it. My boss asked where they got it from and found out there was an upstairs area with more food and an actual bar.

I worked off some food climbing those stairs, at least. My mentor, coworker, and I snagged a few of the cups. My boss didn’t want to trek up the stairs. It took me a few days at the office to realize that the cups were temperature sensitive, turning a dark purple with cold drinks.

There are also elevators! My coworker wanted to take the elevator down, so we tracked one down for her and also got an impromptu look at the “backstage” of the stadium. We spent a little bit listening to the band. My boss likes live music and I felt bad keeping him from listening to the band outside. I grabbed some marshmallows dipped in chocolate and a brownie dipped in chocolate for dessert. Despite being incredibly full.

We made a quick stop at the stadium store before heading outside to wait for the fireworks. I enjoyed the electronica music. I could feel the bass when the fireworks were going off. Not a huge display, but it was still nice to watch, even though we were right under them and had to tilt our heads all the way back to see them. I was glad I wore glasses because the debris was landing right on our faces.

My original plan to arrive, spend maybe 20 mins to check it out, then go back to the hotel turned into staying until 9:45 for the fireworks, then going back to the hotel where I promptly passed out. And had the best night of sleep of my entire trip.

Day 4 (Fri, 5/12)
I woke up afraid I had forgotten to set my alarm, then kind of had a lazy morning in bed before climbing out. I double-checked I had everything packed as we would be going to the conference and then the airport afterward. I went downstairs, turned in my key cards, and tried to figure out what sessions I would go to that day.

Breakfast was at a Filipino restaurant (Ludi’s Restaurant). It felt like I was still digesting food from the start of the trip so I just had a single pancake. I miss the Saturday mornings I’d go out to the family diner with my dad and order a stack of pancakes. So that was my treat. The conference had breakfast bread (the cake-like bread), which I was sad to pass up, but I was already feeling bad about the amount of food I had consumed and would have to burn off when I got home.

There was no keynote and the first session started at 9. The morning group consisted of my boss, my mentor, my coworker, our software architect, and myself. The software architect wanted to grab more stickers, the ones from check-in, and we followed him. The people at the desk were insisting we take as many stickers as we wanted, so we joked about taking an entire stack. We were more modest and just grabbed a few each.

Then we went to the breakout sessions. We ended up sitting in the same room for both sessions. Except after the first session, the software architect took off and came back, showing us pictures of the hardware he saw after talking to the guys at the IoT booth in The Hub. My mentor and I noticed the spinner boxes in those pictures and decided we would try to go grab some before the second session.

We had 5 minutes. Of course we weren’t going to go back. We went through the booths, trying to hunt down the elusive IoT booth, which I knew there were two of. We eventually found it, snagged a spinner each, then I felt guilty and tried to get more info from the guy there who looked bored. He didn’t seem so interested in giving me info and gave me pretty short answers.

I’m sort of used to that response after trying to engage people from gaming companies like Blizzard, but it’s still discouraging. It helps when someone’s with me and my mentor made some attempts to get a conversation going as well, but the guy just didn’t seem to feel it.

So we trawled through more booths. I wanted to grab a bunch of stickers because those were portable and my carry-on space was limited. My other main goal was to talk to the company that was mentioned by Microsoft to us on the first day. We got a more interested response and a demo out of it. I also got some sticker and t-shirt swag. At that point I kind of lost most of my sense of shame and if there was something interesting being offered, I’d grab it.

One exception to this was when I was looking at a booth trying to figure out where I had heard their name from. The guy saw me sort of interested and lured us in with a candy bowl of chocolate. He reminded me of the Bahala Na guys from Germany – really outgoing and friendly, accent and all! I felt really bad I couldn’t recall the product I knew I used until much later. My mentor was playing along trying to vaguely handwave at some product he hoped they had.

After properly looting the booths and scoring a nice tote bag (none of that cheap reusable bag material, but actual decent cloth) to put my personal item/tablet bag and all of my new swag in (which had grown to two t-shirts, a pair of socks, a bunch of stickers, a spinner, a magazine, and some brochures), I was set for the airport with some space to spare. We got back in time for the Q&A part of the second session.

Then, it was lunch. If the attendee party was the peak of the food quality, lunch was a large-ish step down. It was just a sandwich (pulled pork or beef), an apple, chips, and a chocolate cookie. We met up with most of the rest of our group for lunch. Then my coworkers took turns raiding The Hub for goodies. My coworker found a neat 5-in-1 pen that we didn’t see earlier. Meanwhile, I went with my boss to get the car from the hotel.

Then it was back to the convention center to pick up our band and head to the airport. While waiting in line, one of the attendants said a security checkpoint further down was shorter, which resulted in us stampeding down there only to find that it was just about the same. The reason we went? Because we forgot not to follow my old lead. Our software architect, who was further back in line, didn’t see us leave and he got to the gate before us.

I haven’t traveled out of the Seattle airport often. I almost missed the sign that told us to go down the stairs and take the tram over to the next building. We all arrived at the gate before boarding started. That’s all that mattered.

The flight home ended up taking off late. I actually fell asleep while we were waiting to take off. I think the excitement of the trip was catching up to me. Though, instead of sleeping most of the flight back, my mentor and I chatted about life and ideas for implementing what we learned at work.

To finish up the trip, I had a nice dinner with some friends I haven’t seen since my birthday before finally heading home and having a very good night of sleep in my own bed.
—

In the week that’s passed, I’ve managed to keep up with work while watching the recordings of the sessions I missed, furiously reading up on tutorials, and even was looking forward to setting up a Raspberry Pi with IoT Core but found I had some issues with getting the program to detect my microSD to USB adapter. I’m hoping I’m not overdoing it with my drive to catch up to where I should be regarding the new technologies, but I know if I don’t keep the momentum going, I’ll get lazy and it will be hard to pick things back up with the same enthusiasm and drive.

I hope to be more prepared the next time I get a chance to go to Microsoft Build.