Tech Field Day 13 – personal experience, photos and many links

Tech Field Day 13 (#TFD13) took place in Austin, Texas from February, 1 to 3.

It was my second full Tech Field Day Event as a delegate or my third, if you count Tech Field Day Extra at VMworld Barcelona last year, too.

Being at Tech Field Day as a delegate means you stay together for about 72 hours with a group of really smart people from all around the world.

The days are filled with technical presentations, learning, networking and fun.

And so time flies by really fast (too fast, to be honest).

All this is only possible due to the hard work of Stephen Foskett and his awesome Tech Field Day Crew (Claire, Tom and the PrimeImage Media Team). They all give their best to make the days comfortable for the delegates and keep the show running. In a nutshell – one can feel that they really love what they do.

During the three days in Austin, we saw eight presentations at three different locations. Day 1 we’ve spent at the Headquarters of Solarwinds (with an excellent BBQ for lunch – the Brisket was really unbelievable).

Day 2 and 3 took place in our hotel. Respectively we made an excursion to Round Rock and visited DELL EMC for their presentation.

A personal highlight was the transportation for #TFD13.

“Everything is bigger in Texas” is also valid for the cars. And so Stephen rented a stretched HUMMER H2 limo for us.

Side effect: I was able to tick off one item on my personal “what I’ve always wanted to do list”: Ride in a Hummer 🙂

All presentations were available via live stream. It was real fun to see how many people out there were interacting during the presentations using Twitter.

What I also learned was that it is a real advantage for a vendor to offer Trial versions for instant use on the website.

Or, much better, an online demo like eg. Uila or Platform9 with their sandbox. Technical people love to get their hands on a product!

So to all vendors out there: make it easy for them!!!

If you keep it straight forward you will get feedback like this: Bushmr installed Veeam’s Backup Agent for Linux during the presentation and tweeted about the progress:

But #TFD is more than the presentations.

It’s also fun stuff and camaraderie. The latter is the credit of all the delegates and the Tech Field Day crew.

It was again a good feeling to be part of this group of smart folks, to talk with them and listen to their stories. Thanks again for this!

But what was the fun stuff we made?

Well, Stephen is always looking for something really special. During #TFD11 in Boston, we watched a Baseball Game (my first one ever). And for #TFD13 he came up with something exceptional, too:

#TFD13 Alamo Drafthouse CinemaWe went to the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema and watched Blade Runner, a movie I haven’t seen in the past 15 years.

Watching this dark movie from 1982 on a big screen is fantastic (for those who like this genre).

As it plays in Los Angeles in the futuristic year of 2019, one can only hope that Ridley Scott did not know, that there will be a future president Trump when he created the storyline about the question “what’s human and what’s not human”…

Thursday evening we spent at the Roosevelt Room in Downtown Austin. The event was thankfully sponsored by Touchdown PR and it was a great time full of networking with the folks of the presenting companies and Touchdown PR.

All in all a good time in the Texas! I can only holler a big THANK YOU! to Stephen for the invitation.

#TFD13 Link-o-Rama

 

So here is a list of the eight presentations of #TFD13 and the associated link to the recorded sessions. I can only recommend you to take a look at them. It’s a really well invested time:

And here the #TFD13 blog posts published by the delegates (I will update this list on a regular basis):

Deploy StorMagic datastore with vCenter
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Dell EMC
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: SolarWinds
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Robin Systems
StorMagic virtual SAN solution for vSphere and MS Hyper-V
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Veeam
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: StorMagic
Zerostack for a cloud managed datacenter
ZeroStack and the Complex Cloud Conundrum
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Uila
Tech Field Day 13 Preview: Zerostack
Solarwinds Virtualization Manager – not to be missed in a cloud