Yet Another MVP Summit Reflection
So I rolled into denver last nite to a post-mvp-summit Unread Messages folder of over 2000 items. It
took me a solid 3 hours to plow thru all that, but it was well worth it for the trip.
Like everybody else, I obviously can't talk about any tech that's not already public, so this
essentially becomes a shoutout to the guys that I wandered up to and had some fun with.
Day 0, And So It Begins
I have a flight at 8:30 AM to seatac, so I just stay up until the drive to the airport, planning on
hopping on the plane and sleeping till seattle. As Peter
Provost mentioned, that
didn't quite happen. What happened was me staring at the fog out the window, while I waited for over 4
hours as my plane was delayed 15 minutes at a time. The crying baby next to me allows me approximately 10
minutes of nap time, and I land at seatac way later than I wanted, with much less sleep than I wanted,
and a growing distaste for Frontier.
So now i'm having a great time chatting with the growing number of signed-in MVP's and drinking at a
respectable pace. There was a great booth at the sign-in room where MS Research was showing off the
really interesting stuff going on in the Netscan project. I ended up spending most of the
time at the signin room chatting with Marcie Robillard, Steven Smith, Scott
Hanselman, Peter Provost, James Avery, Rob Chartier,
amoung others. I'm not even going to pretend to remember everybody at the table later during the get
together at the W, but I remember a highly political discussion with Plip.
Day 1, Tired and Intrigued at the same time
So I wake up entirely too late to make the free shuttle to the campus, and end up grabbing a cab to
make it there just in time for the sessions. At this point I'm running on about 5 hours sleep since
saturday, still not completely sober from the previous nite, and most likely looking like I have the face
of grim death. However I did wade my way thru some great presentations on the coming features in data and
debugging. And of course the don box and chris anderson show was entertaining, if not particularly
enlightening. Post agenda, we all went out for some beer and pool to Pikes Place Brewery, i think. But at
around 11PM, having over 60 hours of almost uninterupted non-sleep, it was time to crash.
Day 2, Executives and The Big Party
I obviously can't say much about the executive talks beyond, "Ballmer is a great speaker and rallyer
of the troops". However, I sat in on some great discussions in a pseudo-organzied lunch where I was at a
table with community leaders from around the world. After the agenda was done, we all went back to the
campus conference center and had a blast. Ambrose Little has
some great photos. And, as Peter Provost mentioned, upon getting back to the hotel we got invited up
to the presidential suite for an impromptu after party.
Day 3, Deep Tech Talks
I do feel kind of bad because I completely skipped most of the presentations, in favor of sitting
around talking geek with Darren Neimke, Scott Mitchell, James
Avery, and others. That was some good times; with everybody fairly awake and juiced up about deep
tech ideas.
So now the MVP Summit is technically over, but there is always more to do. Personally, I opted to
follow Darren Neimke around, because he has an amazing ability meet with and connect people. I really
can't say enough about how personable Darren is. We spent much of the nite chatting with Justin Rogers (and wife Amy ( Hi Amy ) ) who is one of
the most diversely intelligent devs out there, even if he is a bit too worried about perf for my tastes.
( Just getting in my last jab there justin :)
Day 4, The Wanderers
Darren has plans to stay in seattle for a little while longer, and had set up some extremly loose
arrangements with MS guys to come visit them at the offices during the week, and so we wandered around
the MS campus, popping into buildings and asking if they had some free time to talk. Amoung a few others,
the venerable aspnet dev center guy, Kent Sharkey, was
quite hospitable, and we all had some great threads going. And of course, We also spent some more time
with Justin, and not only that but he and Amy we also extremely kind enough to cart us around town.
Wrap up
So ya, that's the experience. I still can't believe the size of the crowd, both external and internal,
that Microsoft gets together every year for this event. Big thanks to everybody.