I’ve got a collaborative post coming up on the talks themselves on my employer’s blog but as a speaker and tech enthusiast, I wanted to share a few thoughts on the bootcamp as a whole.

Firstly, I’d like to thank Gregor Suttie who organised the Glasgow chapter under the Glasgow Azure User Group banner.

It’s an impressive feat getting so many speakers on so many topics around the world. Each city is going to be limited in the talks they can offer, but I was impressed by the distances some of the speakers at the Glasgow event traveled.

I would have liked to have been more of a global feel. I know the challenges of live video, especially interactive, but this is an event that would benefit from some of that (or indeed, more speakers participating the the online bootcamp via pre-recorded YouTube videos). I realize an event like Google I/O or Microsoft Build is different in focus, being company rather than community driven, but it felt like a set of parallel events rather than one, so it also feels as if some of the content is going to be lost, and there were a lot of interesting looking talks in other cities that turned up on the Twitter hashtags.

There’s obviously a lot to cover under the Azure umbrella, so it’s going to be hard to find talks that interest all the audience all the time, and it was hard to know where to pitch the content. I aimed for an overview for beginners which I think was the right CosmosDb pitch for the Glasgow audience, but I was helped by the serendipity of coming after an event sourcing talk so I could stand on the shoulders of that talk for some of my content.

I would maybe have liked to see more “virtual tracks” so that it was easier to track themes within the hashtags, whether it’s general themes like “data” or “serverless” or technology/tool focused like “CosmosDB”, “Azure DevOps” or “Office 365”, to help me connect with the other channels and see what content is must interesting to follow up. Although Twitter was a good basis for it, I think there’s scope to build a conversational overview on top, into which YouTube videos, Twitter content, Github links, blog posts, official documentation and slide content could be fed.

As a speaker, the biggest challenge was keeping my knowledge up to date with all the updates that are happening, and events like this do help, but as I’ve been on a project that’s Docker and SQL focused recently, it’s a lot of work on top of my day job to keep in touch with the latest updates to CosmosDb, especially as a few tickets on the project were picked up and moved to “In Progress” between submitting and delivering my talk, and a new C# SDK was released.