Azure Superpowers Tour
Firstly, I'd like to thank everyone involved in making this event happen including all attendees, and especially SSW and Adam Cogan for supporting and sponsoring these events, Adam Stephensen for being my wingman or the other way around, and of course my beautiful wife and kids for handling my absence prior and during the tour.
It's been a hell of a couple of weeks. Putting together slides and demos is a lot of work, involving a lot of frustration and a lot of late nights to make sure everything flows smoothly. The prepping is intense and for sure it can't be healthy but at the end of the day when the talk is delivered, the feeling is amazing, being able to travel the country delivering such a great content and learning lots along the way is priceless.
The journey started in Melbourne and although we spent crazy amount hours preparing it I still thought it was half-baked. Can't feel too bad about it though, it was only the first delivery and it was great all the same. In the Gold Coast, we did only one of the talks to use it as a test please. After that, we had a bit of time to play with the talks before Brisbane and I feel the delivery was so much better. When we got to Sydney, the flow of the talk and the coordination between Adam and I was natural. Don't get me wrong, there's always room to improve.
At SSW, we have this awesome culture of feedback. So here we go, a retrospective of the tour (from my end and from what I can remember of other people's feedback):
What Went Well
- Great organization by SSW
- Crazy amount of content in less than 6 hours
- No major issues during the demos
- Overload of information
- Covering different ways to tackle microservices
- Lots of new stuff
- Good overall picture of Azure
What Didn't Go So Well
- Overload of information (it was a bad thing for a few people)
- Font size in some of the demos
- Flicking between notes, commands and code during live demo
- Some garbage (code) left behind of previous demos
What We Can Do Better Next Time
- Target the audience a bit better. Ex: Focusing on development
- Adjust resolution of the laptop before starting
- Create snippets, organize and print notes beforehand
- Clean up environment before each round
Azure HotShots
Resources
Here are some links to the resources we used during the one-day workshop, including slide decks and source code.