Ignite 2023 In-Person Review

This blog post covers my recent trip to Seattle for the Microsoft Ignite Conference in Seattle last week, I always give my honest opinion and have no filter, last years Ignite wasnt great, this years was very much improved and here is why.

This years Ignite was in a new venue, right next door to last years but now its in the newer Seattle Convention Centre and the venue itself works great, not huge amounts of walking and the layout just works. The weather was good, the atmosphere was good all week, there was swag and even the Ignite bag option made a welcome return. Satya was in person for the Keynote which was also awesome to attend his keynote.

I enjoyed this years Ignite for several reasons, I thought the sessions were of a good standard, some people still saying not enough deep dive content but all said and done I thought it hit the mark.

I felt like i was witnessing the dawn of a new era, It really did feel like this is the age of AI, now I know were all sick of hearing about copilots and AI etc etc but this is the start of a huge change in the industry, our way of working is already changing and we are just starting out on the journey, I can’t wait to see where we are this time next year as these language models and the tooling around them gets better we can invent new ways of working faster and smarted – bring it on.

If your or your company isnt seriously looking into AI and what it offers I think you’ll be missing out for sure.

So Ignite was better because of the following reasons:-

• Speakers hung around after sessions to talk
• The ask the experts was super popular
• The venue made it easy to find rooms and move around
• The community lounge had some heavy hitters stop bye and hang out, chat and be able to network with them
• The Keynote’s were in a cool venue with a nice atmosphere
• The content was all about the era of ai but its exciting times and a lot of the sessions demo’d whats new and whats coming next
• We had more some new MVP Networking meetups with the Azure Cosmos DB team on campus and the Azure MVP Leads
• Networking with old and new friends and just enjoying learning about new technologies and generally having fun. A big thing for me is meeting the people I connect with online so its so much fun to meet them in person and say hi.
• The after parties were pretty good, I really enjoyed the silent disco not gonna lie

Highlights included meeting Brendan Burns, Mark Russenovich, Erin Chapple, some guys called Patch and Switch, dunno who they are really, and going to watch the Seattle Kracken which was awesome!

See you in Vegas next year!