I spent last Tuesday to Thursday at the Microsoft US National Architect Forum.
The USNAF has recently been broadened from a regional event to a national event. Basically, Microsoft brings out a group of IT architects from various companies, mostly from their clients, and provide them a place to network and share architectural thoughts.
My company only got one ticket to the event, so I was a bit surprised I was the one to attend. It was hosted in Vail Colorado, a great skiing destination. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any skiing done because the schedule was really packed with sessions and the ski season was almost over at this time of the year.
There was also a problem with my flight. I originally booked a flight on Tuesday that leaves OAK at 11:10am, and I already printed out the boarding pass from home. On Tuesday morning, before I left for the airport, I had the foresight of checking on the flight status, and found out the flight was cancelled! I wasn’t even contacted about this, and I learned from my travel agent that I was bumped to a later flight, which leaves OAK at 5pm. I was a bit disappointed, someone could have at least let me know that my flight was cancelled. Anyway, the 5pm flight introduced a new problem. There was a reception scheduled on Tuesday night, however, since the flight takes 2 hours, there is 1 hour timezone difference between Vail and Oakland, and the Vail hotel I’m staying in is 140 miles away from the airport. I only got to the hotel at around 11:30pm, well past the reception time. So I missed the reception, which was definitely a good opportunity to network.
Another thing I found out was I was feeling dizzy because of 8000 feet above sea-level of Vail. I didn’t sleep well at all the first night, only for about 5 hours.
I woke a bit groggy the next morning, and I had a full day ahead of me, so I got up and started the day.
There was a bus waiting in front of the hotel taking us from our hotel to the Marriott for the morning session. I got on the bus, and arrived at Mar riot within 5 minutes. It was a nice day, the sky was blue and mountain-side was covered by snow.
I mainly went there to find out what people are doing in Enterprise Architecture, and how far down the road they are with Service Oriented Architecture. Thus most of the sessions I signed up for are either panel discussions or round-table on EA and SOA topics.
Most of the sessions were well organized and well presented. However, most weren’t presented at the level of detail that I’m interested in.
Overall, it was a fine experience. I was able to talk to people in the same line of work. The only regret I had was that I wasn’t able to finish the last keynote session by Paul Glen, the author of the bestseller Leading Geeks. I stayed for the first 30 minutes, and it was the most fun I had during the whole NAF. However, I had to leave to catch my plane. I did get a free copy of the book, and I’ll review it once I’m done reading it.
Until next time.