Conferences

Careful what you wish for

My last in-person conference before the pandemic was NDC London back in January 2020. I distinctly remember being quite tired at the beginning of 2020. For me, 2019 had been a long year with 50+ speaking engagements at a variety of conferences all around the world. I just wanted to take a short break in early 2020.

Little did I know that the short break would turn into a 2.5 year long break due to a global pandemic. I’m extremely grateful that I was able to continue working and speaking in many online conferences during the pandemic. However, as the pandemic dragged on, my enthusiasm for online events diminished. I sorely missed connecting with other speakers, meeting attendees, and exploring the city I was speaking in.

Last week was a quite interesting week in terms of travel. First I got to visit Zurich again after a while for .NET Day and then I got to visit the Croatian coastal town Split for the first time for Shift Conference.

.NET Days in Zurich

When I used to work at Adobe, part of my team was based in Basel, Switzerland. As a result, I used to visit Basel, Zurich and other Swiss cities quite often. Since I left Adobe, I visited Switzerland only once 2 years ago. I was naturally excited to visit Zurich again for .NET Day.

Istanbul is one of those crazy dynamic cities with friendly people, amazing history, great shopping and above all, a food heaven. Naturally, I was excited to be back for Java Day Istanbul conference.

I came a day early to meet with a partner and visit a customer. They had lots of questions on Kubernetes and hybrid-cloud. It was quite useful for me to hear about their challenges about moving to the cloud and propose some solutions.