I’m back home, safe and sound. Maybe I’m a little tired, but the week was worthwhile. I was attending the Developer Summit, which is Esri’s technical conference, as compared to the more user-focused User Conference, which happens each summer in San Diego. It’s Esri’s opportunity to share new technologies with the developer and sys admin community so that we can go out and create and/or configure new solutions for users based on them. It’s thousands of geo-geeks converging in one place.
When I am at the Dev Summit, I have three main goals:
- Learn about new technologies,
- Attend sessions about technologies that I think I understand, just in case there are surprises and
- Meet up with people from across Canada and around the world who are seldom all in the same place at the same time.
Normally, this is the order of importance for me but this year it was inverted. I think I only was in two sessions the whole week on technology that was new to me. Most of the sessions were like #2, and most importantly I met up with a number of solution architects from around the world. This all culminated in a meeting Friday morning at breakfast with representatives from Esri Australia, Germany and UK and an agreement to set up a working group and regular meetings to share information. It’s part of my new position and one of my objectives for the year. Harold wanted me to reach out to some of these in 2017, and I’d say I hit it out of the park with my meetings this week.
Another interesting thing about the week was I went without taking my glasses. I took contact lenses and a pair of sunglasses only. There were a couple of reasons for this, but the first was the summer-like weather and the constant movement inside to outside and back again.
Normally, I have to juggle my glasses and prescription sunglasses constantly at this conference. This way was much easier. I do envy people with good eyesight. I also wanted to start using up my stockpile of lenses: my eyes have changed and I need to get stronger ones, but I have practically ten years’ supply at home. I need a stronger lens, particularly when I am riding.
The weather was warm to start and climbed up to 32 degrees by Friday. This, of course, made for a rude shock when I flew back to Calgary.
The weather had been very cold all week, and was minus 20 when I landed. There were four inches of snow on the Golf in the parking lot, it wouldn’t start, and I didn’t have any gloves with me. I plugged it in, brushed it off, and waited about 15 minutes for the block heater to do its thing. It was cold… and then on the way home I stopped to help push a fellow’s van that was struggling for traction.
It was a good week, but draining. I managed to fill my circles by making time to go to the hotel gym or longer walks which was a good thing. I also was well-behaved on the eating and drinking fronts, so I’m feeling about as well as I could given the long, long days of PowerPoint slides.
You get “2 at a boy” for a job well done.
Welcome back Simon sounds like a successful week.