Fun in Netherlands (Presenting @ DevDays, Before You Get Any Ideas)

As anticipated, a couple of weeks ago I came back to EU to present at the Belgian TechDays and at the Netherland’s DevDays.

For schedule constraints, I ended up being able to travel from Antwerp to the Hague only Thursday night (a nice train ride with Isabel, during which I once again confirmed that Spaniards and Italians are not that different after all ). As a result, all my 3 sessions in Netherlands had to take place on a single tour de force on Friday. Kudos to some of the guys there, who came to hear my blabbering at 9:15, came back from more at 13:15, and even braved my session in the last slot of the conference at 4:15.

Fun fact: when I arrived to check in the speaker room on Friday morning, with my breakfast uniform (frys, jeans and long sleeved t-shirt got during one speaking engagement at Disneyworld), the lady at the counter told me that they had only medium speaker polos left. Let’s just say that the Mickey tee was much preferable to that…

The DevDays guys already uploaded the videos to Channel9, hence you can see for yourself:

Important: MSDN Blogs will clip the embeded player, double click on it while playing to set it at full screen.

Here that was early morning and I was still reasonably energetic. The deep dive session was a bit harder:

Here there’s the thing. A lot of our story for identity and access control in the cloud is ACS, hence the overlap between my usual intro to identity and the cloud and the first few slides of any ACS session is pretty significant (with the sole exception a room where the audience all played with ACS before, in which case you can skip). Here more than half of the room didn’t know anything about ACS; OTOH the other almost-half was at my earlier session. I knew I had to repeat the main intro & ACS demo for the benefit of the former, but the presence of the latter made me feel guilty that I was repeating stuff they heard just few hours earlier; hence I really glided through that part, in hindsight perhaps a bit too fast. However I got really good questions and really good laughs, hence I’ll go ahead and assume it was not a complete disaster after all

The last session of the day I was, quite frankly, exhausted; and so was my audience, although the smaller room made it harder to hide and drift. However a Red Bull really helped here: I never ever drink it unless I have to drive after a long flight or, you know, I have to talk about SaaS to an audience that endured 2 super-packed conference days and is braving the last slot on a less than trivial topic. I didn’t re-watch myself, but I was told that things were pretty lively nonetheless.

The DevDays experience was great. Kudos to Arie Leeuwesteijn , Matthijs Hoekstra and the rest of the crew for a job well done. I had a lot of fun, and acquired a few tens of new twitter followers (at @vibronet) in the process. In fact, just for setting expectations I am usually not a prolific twitterer but all those people may just shame me into tweeting more!

I certainly hope I’ll have the chance to come back next year. Until then, don’t be shy: send me your questions, one you your colleagues can confirm that I may not get back to you right away but when I do you’ve got a lot of stuff to read