Looking to Microsoft Ignite: A first time attendee's journey to find out what's awesome!

When I was in 12th grade, I made a fateful decision which would guide most of my life. My dad was working at Bank of America and he had an opportunity to purchase a computer through a discount program. He decided that for my graduation, he would give me a new computer and he brought the price sheet home to show me. In it, there were two options...a Mac or a PC. At the time, my experience with Apple was limited to the Apple IIe I programed in Pascal with at school; The very first Macintosh had just come out, so I didn't really know the difference. I remember not knowing which to pick, flipping a coin in my head and going for the mac.

Decades later, I find myself working for Microsoft at LinkedIn Learning in my very first Microsoft conference...Ignite. Needless to say, I feel a bit like a fish out of water, really more like a cat that's been adopted by a giraffe family. I'm glad Microsoft is now a much more inclusive company than the one I experienced growing up. I feel quite at home here seeing a bunch of my Mac totting buddies. Nobody is looking at me like I'm a human in the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, people are cool and friendly...so far so good. It is the first day.

In a way, Ignite feels like an out of body experience, the scale of the conference is like nothing I've ever encountered. I live in Central Florida somewhat near where the conference is being hosted. Most of the conferences take a fraction of the convention center. This is the first time I've heard of anything taking up the entire place...just me and 26,000 of my closest friends.

What I'm Excited About

First, I'm really excited about the scale of the place and the fact that there are so many IT and Enterprise Developer professionals. I have a hard time talking to my friends and family about what I do, so being with so many other people of a kindred spirit is going to be awesome. I'm curious about what people think about LinkedIn and LinkedIn learning, so this is a chance to connect.

When we prepare courses, it's always in a vacuum. No, we don't live in the space station, but it sure feels like that sometimes. Without any direct feedback from people (a.k.a. corporeal beings), it will be great to hang out with some real humans that are into technology as much as I am.

Here's a list of some of the things that I'm looking forward to with some help from our great LinkedIn Learning authors.

Hololens

Hololens is one of those technologies that you have to try out in person. They're hard to get a hold of, so this is a perfect opportunity to get up close and personal with it. We have a great course on Hololens, but it will be awesome to try it out in person.

Microsoft Surface Studio, Dial and Pen

One of the technologies that mac users secretly drool over is the Microsoft Surface Studio. It's one of those computers that you think came straight out of Apple Design's lab. Microsoft has always been awesome with input devices and the dial looks real interesting. I've inadvertedly tried to touch my Mac's screen many times, so I want to get to play with the Surface Studio, touch and some of the input devices to see what I hope the future of the Mac is like.

Microsoft Power Apps

I'm really being efficient and productive. My friend Doug Winnie showed me this thing called Power Apps, which is an easy way to build applications from different data sources. Want to build a simple app that grabs some data from Excel and publish it on the web...cake. It's one of those things that leaves your mouth wide open when you see it. I'm hoping to find some demos and training for this during this week.

Visual Studio Code

I started using Visual Studio Code when we were acquired by Microsoft thinking I'd probably need to get started learning more MS technologies and I fell in love immediately. It's built for web development with very little setup out of the box. Intellisense, which is the technology within VSCode that provides helpful tips is amazing. I now use both Atom and VSCode to do all of my coding, recording courses in VSCode most of the time.

Teams

Slack was one of those technologies that changed the way I communicated in the same way that email changed it in the 80s. I've been wondering how well Microsoft Teams compared to Slack and I can tell you, it's much better. The integrations are better, message threading is better. It's hard for me to go back to slack now. So I'm looking forward to some talks on MS Teams to see what I'm missing and what I can learn.

Azure

Microsoft has all of these names associated with their products that are tough for non-initiates to parse. Azure is one of these, it's simply Microsoft's Cloud Server Platform. It is Microsoft's answer to AWS, virtualization and much more. I've gotten a taste of it and want to learn more about what can be done and how I can use it for virtualizing environments and servers for web development.

#msignite, #azure, #surface, #MSTeams, #powerapps