Getting Back was Harder

Tammy, Ian and I rolled into bed around 2:30 am today. That wasn’t the plan.

But let’s rewind a bit. I got to Palm Springs without any real issues. I was a half hour late getting in due to a delay in the plane leaving Calgary. That just meant that I needed to take the taxi to the hotel, throw my stuff in the room and then head over to the conference centre to register (get my badge and lanyard) and attend the social event. Afterwards, there was a dinner that was set up by one of the other managers on my team, but that didn’t quite go to plan. It turns out that the Palm Canyon Roadhouse closed early on Monday nights, despite what their website says. The group then walked up to Las Casuelas Terraza, which was open. I wasn’t really in need of any more food after having some chicken fingers and a fabulous grilled cheese sandwich at the social event. But I did want to have a margarita so I sat down at the table. We had a great time socializing with people I’d either met recently or hadn’t seen in person since the year before COVID hit.

The issue came when I went to pay for my drink. The waitress had treated the table as a group and hadn’t noted anyone’s orders individually. And it wasn’t like we were in a position to pay as one bill and then expense it: the rules of alcohol consumption had been laid out clearly prior to the trip. In the end, David paid for the food (to be reimbursed) and I managed to collect funds from 20 people for the drinks and there were a couple credit cards to pay for the balance, but it still was a gong show. I know I ended up paying $20 USD for my drink, which given the state of the Canadian dollar meant for effectively a $28 margarita. It’s a good thing it was tasty and the socializing was great.

I stayed at the Hotel Zoso, one of the big “four-star” hotels near the conference centre that I hadn’t stayed at yet. When you’ve been coming to the same conference as often as possible since 2006, you end up staying at most of the hotels.

The room was very disappointing. The good parts:

• The Wi-Fi was good.
• The in-room coffee (Wolfgang Puck Keurig machine) was good.
• The bed was comfy.
• The climate control worked and was not noisy.

The rest was not good. The room was not particularly up-to-date, the carpet was not clean, the shower didn’t work well, there was music playing somewhere in the hotel at 2 am on Wednesday night, it was as expensive as hell ($2200 Canadian for four nights) and no one made up my room in four days, even after I requested it on the third day. Oh well.

Breakfasts were on the patio in front of the conference centre, with a light offering (yogurt fruit parfait, coffee and a “main”: breakfast burrito, donut, breakfast sandwich or muffin offered each day) and a beautiful view. Lunch was a variety of food and a serious meal, not a boxed lunch kind of thing. The hard part was not overeating and eating too much of the wrong things. I managed never to go up and get a second desert, but as I texted to Tammy: “the struggle is real”.

There was a lot of food consumed with the breakfasts, lunches and social events in the evenings. Each year at the closing session, Esri likes to put up the stats on the consumption for the week.

The conference was actually much better attended than I expected. There were 1800 people there and at times it felt crowded. If diseases were circulating, I’m doomed and will come down with something shortly.

In total, I attended 20 sessions, including the plenaries, keynote, technical sessions and demo theatre sessions. My favourite was the last session on Tuesday night, where the team was discussing their ongoing effort to rewrite the ArcGIS Field Maps app using SwiftUI. It had little to do with my current position at Esri, but it was the most interesting to me. Overall, the conference was refocused on developer-specific topics. Over the years, it had drifted to being more of a general technical conference with lots of developer content. But this year there was much less architectural or platform management content and almost all Python, JavaScript, .NET, Swift, etc. I enjoyed it, but if you add up the costs of the trip ($560 flight, $2200 hotel, $2000 registration, other expenses) it’s a lot of money for something that’s not really focused on me or my team. I wonder if this will be my last time there?

But if it is the last time, at least I went out with a victory: at the Dev Summit Party on Thursday night, I signed up for the ping pong and I won my match. I got a little gift bag, and my name was in for a draw for a bigger prize. It would have been cool if it was a tournament like Dodgeball, but this was lower pressure.

Friday morning I woke up with what was going to be the first of a series of notifications from WestJet about delays in my flight home. It was originally scheduled for 5:30 pm, but it was delayed to 6:30, 7:00, 7:30, 8:00, 8:20 and finally 8:40. This wouldn’t have been that much of an issue, except for it was going to be late getting to Calgary and Tammy was supposed to pick me up. I hadn’t taken a warm jacket with me to Palm Springs, and it was -13 and snowing back home. I did my best to kill the time, but it still was 7.5 hours from the end of the conference to the flight time. I was relieved when the plane finally took off.

As I said, it was a very late night and we’re pretty low-energy today. Miranda’s at work at Abbey’s and I’ll go get her later. In the meantime, let’s just relax.

Okay, okay. So I did an indoor cycling event this morning on Zwift. But other than that.