Recap of MVP Summit 2010

I attended the 2010 MVP summit this year for the first time.

So it all started for me at 4:15 AM (EST) on Monday, this means it was only 1:15 AM in Seattle. I took a 7:35 flight from Newark New Jersey to Seattle Washington. I met Denny Cherry at the airport and we took a cab to Bellevue. This summit all the hotels for the guests were in Bellevue.

Bellevue at night


View from the hotel room




I have been checking the weather in Seattle for the last couple of months and noticed that it is 55 degrees and it rains 6 days out of 7....I was thinking to myself who would want to live here? Well as it turns out it was sunny every from Wednesday till Saturday and we really lucked out. I even took a little visit to Lake Washington.



At least I think that is Lake Washington but I could be wrong.


Microsoft Campus
I was really impressed with the campus, they have a ski shop, a barber shop, a bike shop, many restaurants and even an artificial turf soccer field.


There were 2 full days of sessions on Microsoft's campus. These were really interesting sessions, I met some of the people who worked on SQL Server and it was interesting to pick these people's brain or complain about some of the stuff that they created. The SQL team really put some interesting sessions together and I would like to thank them for that.



After these sessions we had dinner with some of the Microsoft employees, I was seated with the Azure team and we had some interesting conversations about Azure and databases in the cloud in general.

Networking

I finally met and talked to so many of the people I only knew from online newsgroups, blogs and forums. Here is just a small list:

Kevin Kline
Erland Sommarskog
Rod Colledge
Adam Machanic
Louis Davidson
Itzik Ben-Gan
Kalen Delaney
Joe Web
Dejan Sarka

Pinal Dave
Matija Lah
Michael Coles
Hugo Kornelis
Alejandro Mesa
Arnie Rowland
Kevin Boles


I (and many others) also signed two copies of the SQL Server Deep Dives book that will be given away at SQL Saturday in NYC on April 24th


Desynchronosis
Jet lag really kicked my behind the first couple of days, even though I didn't go to sleep until 11:15 PM on Tuesday night (meaning I was up for 22 hours already) I woke up at 2:30 AM on Wednesday..after tossing and turning for 30 minutes I decided to hit the gym. Luckily for me the gym is open 24/7 at the Hyatt.


I read or listened to the following things while flying or being awake during vampire hours and walking around Bellevue.

Finished In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto

Finished half of The Lost Symbol

Finished 40 % of MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-448): Microsoft SQL Server 2008-Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance: MCTS Exam 70-448 (Self-Paced Training Kits)

Listened to the following podcasts:
This week in tech
This week in google
Security now
Windows weekly
The disciplined investor
Dotnetrocks (2 episodes)

Shutter Island

After all the sessions were done on Friday I decided to go see Shutter Island. I really liked this movie and highly recommend it. The ending is very interesting.


Mount Ranier
On my way home I snapped these two pics of Mount Ranier from the parking garage at Seattle airport