Microsoft Ignite Tour London edition – my take on it

This past week I attended the Microsoft Ignite Tour London edition, it was a day 2 event held at the London Excel Arena near the Docklands.

This event is part of a global tour Microsoft are doing and its FREE for anyone to attend, if you haven’t managed to attend one as yet I highly recommend you do, there is an amazing amount of sessions to go to covering a vast array of subject areas and if your using Microsoft software there will be something for you there.

I attended a number of session which are presented by Microsoft MVP’s as well as Microsoft employees.

As a dev it was great to be able to hang around the ask the experts area and see the faces I look up to and follow on social media, the list of well know people there was pretty substantial and they were very accessible if you wanted to rock up and say hi or if you had any kind of questions for them.

The fact that the event has these available people and the content is free makes it very compelling, I will definitely be back next year and I hear that things will only be getting better and better.

These types of events are something I need to personally go along to far more, being able to network and introduce myself to these kinds of people is something I recognise that I need to get better at, I recognised a number of people and only spoke to a few, next time I’ll rectify that.

I went to sessions on Data and AI, Arm Templates within Azure, Azure DataFactory and ingesting data and many more. The speakers are made readily available for questions and people who work on the teams hang out and there is a number of demo stations which change throughout both days, I really liked the demo stations and if I am honest that’s something I would love to do.

On Day 2 I decided to skip some sessions and network and I got a lot out of that, I met over 50 people who I follow on twitter and it was awesome to meet them in person and ask them what they’re working on and what sessions they liked the most.

Shout out to all the people who came up to me and say hi! – wearing my Octopus Deploy hoodie helped people recognise me so that was pretty neat.

Off the back of the event I feel a renewed energy and a clearer idea of what I want to learn, where id like to improve upon and also met people who do the type of job that one day I aspire to do.

It’s not every day you get the chance to see thee people in person and ask them questions etc, I will need to get over being shy and just say hi and go from there, I think it’s something a lot of people struggle with, so I’m not alone.

All of the session slides and more can be found here on the Microsoft Tech Communities Page

Roll on next years event and I’m also hoping to go to Ignite in Florida later this year!