I’m finally completely recovered from a great week in Seattle last week for PASS Summit.  Now that it’s back to the grind of regular work I thought I’d put together some thoughts and tell you about my experiences from the week. 

You may have read others blogs about their experiences during the conference.  I always love how everyone may do very different things while at this conference but still have a great time!

My week started early as I arrived in Seattle on Saturday to prepare for MVP Summit that was going on at the same time.  There were some mixed opinions about these events going on at the same time but I liked it.  I think this helped many that are from out of the country justify coming to both events in a single trip rather then making two expensive and time consuming trips to Seattle.  MVP Summit started Sunday for SQL Server MVPs and ended a bit early for me, on Monday, because I delivered a Pre-Con on Tuesday.  Once our day in Redmond was done on Monday I went and registered for the PASS Summit in Seattle and called it an early night, knowing that I had a full day of talking during my Pre-Con coming up the next day.

Tuesday

This was a very full day as Brian Knight (Blog | Twitter) and myself taught a full day of SSIS: Problem, Design, Solution in our Pre-Con.  The Pre-Con was well attended with about 140 attendees.  I really enjoyed teaching and even attending sessions like these that focus on solving problems.  There’s many reasons why I attend PASS Summit but one of the biggest is that I want to learn things that I can immediately go use to help me solve problems when I get back to work.  I think we accomplished that with this session.  It’s was very focused on problems and different ways to solve them using SSIS.

Brian and I have done many presentations together over time but we’re always learning still.  One of the things we learned from feedback last year was to provide a PowerPoint deck with a little more substance.  PASS prints these decks for attendees to keep and take notes on.  While a single image slide with verbal discussion comes across great in a presentation it’s not effective when the slides are printed.  By the way, I still like the single image slide for presentations but not when you know the slides are printed for attendees.

Feedback on the session this year seemed to be pretty good but I’ll know for sure when the reviews are released.

Once the Pre-con was done I dropped my things off at the hotel and came back to the conference for the Welcome Reception.

Later that night I went to the Networking Party that was moved to Yard House.  I stayed and talked for a bit and meet some new people.  Unfortunately it looked like they weren’t ready to handle that volume of people at once so I ordered a meal from somewhere else to end my night.

Wednesday

On Wednesday I started my morning after breakfast by attending the Keynote feature T.K. “Ranga” Rengarajan, James Phillips, and Joseph Sirosh from Microsoft.  Definitely some interesting things announced during the this Keynote including Power BI Dashboard Preview coming soon.  You can watch the Keynote still on PASStv

Wednesday I had to deliver my session towards the end of the day so I wasn’t able to attend as many sessions as I would have liked, as I did some practice runs of my session. I did however attend Bradley Balls (Blog | Twitter) session on Using PowerShell to Manage Cloud Integrated Data Platforms. Brad always does a great job and shows his passion for the technology.  He showed many of the capabilities that PowerShell has for integrating into Azure.

Towards the end of the conference day I sat in the session that was prior to mine because I was a bit worried that there would be a lot of cross over with my topic because it was Power View related too.  Luckily there was very little that was the same.  I did my session on Creating and End to End Reporting Solution with Power View.  I think it went pretty well, even with Excel crashing on me.  I always have a back up ready 🙂.  There was a lot of interest in Power View with SharePoint and how Multidimensional cubes interact with Power View so I saved some time towards the end for that discussion.

Immediately after my session I ran down to the Expo Hall for the Exhibitor Party where I was doing a book signing for Pragmatic Works.  We do this every year and it’s always a blast to meet so many people and give away free books!

Here’s a video Jeremy from our team who took showing the line that built up.

After the Exhibitor Party Pragmatic Works hosted our annual karaoke party at the Hard Rock with a live band.  I always have fun here and was able to catch up with friends.

Thursday

I started my day by attending the Keynote by Dr Rimma Nehme. This was possibly one of the best Keynotes I’ve attended.  Her explanation of cloud computing was done in a way that I think my sales team would be comfortable with.  You can watch the Keynote still on PASStv.

You can watch the Keynote here or read Steve Jones’ (Blog | Twitter) summary here.

In between networking with a few new folks I also attended two session: The BI Power Hour and Top Five Power Query M Functions That You Don’t Know.

The BI Power Hour is always a fun “infotainment” type session with many of the members of the Power BI product team.

I also really enjoyed the Top Five Power Query M Functions session.  I’ve always really liked Power Query but Reza Rad (Blog | Twitter) showed me a few new tricks!

I ended my day by attending the PASS Community Appreciation Party at the EMP (Experience Music Project) Museum.  This place is always fun and of course they had live band lead karaoke.

Friday

This was my day to work the Pragmatic Works booth so my morning was eaten up by that. To end the day I sat in on the Speaker Idol competition. The winner of the last round would be guaranteed a session at PASS Summit 2015. I was curious to watch this because we do a version of this locally for the user group in Jacksonville. Here’s Jason Carter (Blog | Twitter) doing his presentation

I had a late flight home and actually didn’t end up back in Jacksonville until 11 AM Saturday morning… Long day!

If you’ve never been to a PASS Summit before I highly recommend it.  It is an event run by the community, which makes it unique.  While there are sponsorships and partnerships it’s community run so you hear from and meet a lot of people that are going through the same things you are.  Next years PASS Summit will be Oct 27-30. I hope to see you there!