Microsoft Ignite, The Tour London
On January 25th I travelled for the 2nd time this year to London. I really love London and the variety of conferences this metropole hosts.
This time it was time for a brand new conference: Microsoft, The Ignite Tour. Microsoft Ignite is a big conference in the US. But since fall 2018 many of the Microsoft experts are touring the world. The concept of the conferences is: no keynotes, but a lot of break-outs straight from the experts.
The conference bought also a nice networking experience. You could network at the Microsoft booth with the experts from The States. I call it Microsofties as you know from other blogposts. There was also a drinks reception, specific booths par division. I liked especially the Diversity in Tech booth. More about Diversity and Inclusion are also covered in my session report.
This conference covered a lot of Diversity & Tech talks and panels. I really liked it. I visited more D&I than tech talks, at a tech conference! Love it!
The technical talks:
I liked the talk Discovering Microsoft Azure form Jim Bennett. I use Azure quite a long time but Azure expands so fast. When I started by example, containers didn’t exist. In this talks Jim gave a good explanation of containers in Azure. There are also a lot of new compute options. Jim covered them all. But the biggest take-away from this talk is about the Azure Resource Manager. I used it wrong, honestly. With the new knowledge I can configure it the right way right now!
“I have a hammer, a hammer in the morning, a hammer in the evening…” is the song Jim Bennett pushed into my brain in his demo of Microsoft Cognitive Services in the talk Using Artificial Intelligence to augment data. This was a good talk with a very good understanding to get started.
What’s the difference between a picture (file) in Azure Blobs and Azure Files? A big difference! Azure Files are for data storage. The data can be a picture by example, but also a lot more. The files can be used via an external disk. If you are putting a picture in Azure Blobs it’ meant to be shared as JSON. This was one of the lessons Amy Boyd learned me at the session Storing Data in Azure!.
D&I
How were the Paralympics in London accessible to all? What were the first opinions? What happened to the UK people after the Paralympics? The London Paralympics has definitely changed a lot in the mind of people about life with physical disabilities. A view under the hood of the London Paralympics was covered by Dan Brooke, Hector Minto and Kerry Hollis
The Autism Hiring Program is my favorite one in US. Pity it’s not in Belgium. As people know I am autistic and working for Microsoft is one of my dreams. I learned more about the program in the talk It’s Ok to be not ok. Ayeshna Hirani, Marleen Reininger and Rob Ede covered also what Microsoft is doing to support mental health.
The rest of the conference was filled with topics as the LGBT+ Community. D&I islands in corporates and of course a lot of sessions about Microsoft Teams.
After this conference I needed to make an action plan to get started when I am home. In fact everyone should do this? Which people will you contact first? Which technology to test first. One of my actions of my action plan was definitely subscribing to the Diversity and Tech community online. I am happy with this step.
So this was my report of Microsoft Ignite The Tour London. I loved it! More legs of the tour here:
