I just got back from Jacksonville, where I spoke at Code Impact. This is a great community event put together by Microsoft MVP Bayer White and crew. This is Code Impact’s second year running and it was a great event. There were 6 tracks packed with great events and speakers with topics catering to a wide range of software professionals.
I gave two talks: TFS 2015 and TFS Build. They both went really well, I got some great questions and feedback from attendees.
I brought my 10-year-old son with me and he enjoyed his first tech conference.
After my TFS Build talk during the first session of the day, I checked out David Haney’s talk StackOverflow and how they can serve so many requests on just 9 web servers. It was a very informative talk with a mix of technology and company culture. I took some notes on both fronts.
It’s been a while since I got hit by the demo gremlins, but just as I was watching David’s talk, and I was preparing for my TFS 2015 talk, I tried booting up my TFS 2015 VM only to be greeted by a “Catastrophic error” message while restoring the VM. I figured “no worries, I have snapshots” and as I went back on each snapshot, I kept getting the same error. I panicked for about 10 seconds, and then came to my senses and decided to use one of my Visual Studio Online team projects for the demo, since afterall, there is near feature-parity between TFS 2015 and VSO. It ended up being an even better talk since I touched on the differences between the two. Nothing like “fresh off the presses” slides.
During my TFS 2015 talk, I left my son watching Bill Reiss and Joe Healy’s talk on “Intro to Game Development”, I figured that he’d have much more fun with that than with a TFS talk (he already sat through my TFS Build talk). He really enjoyed that talk.
After lunch, we sat on Joe’s GameMaker for Beginners talk. It was another great talk that covered the basics of game development and in less than an hour, Joe had a space game going, so it was some really cool stuff.
We called it a day after that talk. I probably could’ve pushed for another hour or so, but I wanted to make sure that my son stayed with a positive experience in his mind. There were a bunch of other talks that I wish I could’ve gone to, there were just too many to choose from.
I’m really happy that I could make it to Jacksonville again this year. There is a great Microsoft developer community up there. I encourage you to go up there again next year and watch this great event get bigger and better. Thank you to the organizers, speakers, sponsors, and of course, attendees!