Week of 13th - 20th May 2024

In March, I attended the Microsoft MVP Summit. It was my first trip to Seattle and my first time at the Summit. It was a great opportunity to meet some of the great minds that I have been following and learning from throughout my career. There was a ton of learning(all under NDA) so much that by the end of day 3 my brain cried "rest!!!!". 

I got accepted as a speaker to a number of conferences and meetups. In April, I gave the talk "REST, gRPC, GraphQL or Asynchronous Messaging" at DDD South West. The Asynchronous Messaging part of this session was completely new and had a good overlap with my job. So, I poured all my energy and almost 3 months of learning into this session. It was a way for me to validate and also share what I had learnt in the last few months. I also wrote an article as an additional resource to the session, which you can read here. The feedback I received was great! Someone even went ahead to write "Can I give 6 stars?" that made my day. I am doing this talk again at several different conferences and meetups, visit my Sessionize profile to see my upcoming conference/meetup appearances.

At DDD South West, I also got to participate in a podcast panel. I was previously a guest on The Unhandled Exception podcast, talking about gRPC, so when Dan Clarke asked me whether I could be a part of his panel, I didn't have to think twice. It was a great conversation that you can listen to here. 

In May, I got to be a part of TechoramBE with my session "Spoilt for choice for real-time apps in .NET - Azure Web PubSub or SignalR". Techorama is one of my favourite conferences and the organisers stepped it up a level or two higher as it was their 10th anniversary edition. The theme was "Fun Fair". There were rides at the venue!!!!! All the 1800 people at the conference were amazed by the conference. It was something like no other conference. Have a look at the photos here.

The last three months have flown by as I learned tons and prepared for my sessions. It's no mean feat! A serious amount of work goes into a presentation. Both these sessions were one-hour sessions. For me, I am looking at an average of 100 hours of work per one-hour presentation that includes the story, slides, demos, practice, and, most importantly, research!

On that note, I am leaving this video by Gui Ferreira for you to watch. In the video, Gui explains what you should avoid while submitting conference proposals. I am an experienced speaker, but I struggle from time to time with abstracts. So I found this video a real gem in reminding me of what I should be doing. Hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

That is it from me this week, I will be back next week with some more learning links and resources.