I spent a few days at DevConnections this week and really enjoyed the conference. The location was Aria in Las Vegas, where I’ve never been, but it was a new, really nice hotel and there was one amazing thing:
The wi-fi worked.
Not on and off, pretty much the entire time I was sitting in sessions, I had access from my devices. I think that was the first time this worked for me at a conference. Congrats to DevConnections and Aria.
The conference itself was short for me, with too many other commitments for presentations and talks, I had to cut short my time there. Tues afternoon – Thur morning, which mean I saw a couple talks on Tues, only one on Wed, and gave two Wed.
That’s disappointing. There were other things I wanted to see, and I wish I had the chance to do more. I’ll be looking to schedule less trips next year as more and more I am finding myself picking up things from really interesting sessions.
One of the great things about DevConnections is that I can get a variety of knowledge from the event. I watched a session on Azure diagnostics, as I’m curious how to actually track the performance and issues of your application. I still hope to port some (or all) of SQLServerCentral to Azure, so understanding the telemetry is something I’d like to have.
From there, I went to an interesting logical query processing talk from Itzik Ben-Gan, which I really enjoyed. If you get the chance to see Mr. Ben-Gan talk, you should take it.
That’s hard to do at many events, where we often have the focus on one technology. There’s nothing wrong with that, and we have some amazing events in the SQL Server community. However there are times that I want to learn a bit more about development, Sharepoint, Azure, or something else. DevConnections gives you the chance to do so, as does DevIntersection/SQLIntersection (coming in November).
If you wear multiple hats, think about coming to one of these conferences in the future.
Voice of the DBA 