Last month I Embarked on an epic American adventure across the vast landscapes of the USA, I found myself swept up in a whirlwind of excitement. This adventure spanned 8 exhilarating days, involved 6 airborne escapades, 4 diverse states, and immersed me in 2 unique events. Each end of this adventure, as distinct as night and day, proved to be a treasure trove of experiences, lots of learning, and making every moment of travel an investment in unforgettable memories.
The first stage of my American adventure saw me travel to Arizona to attend the EUC Unplugged (formerly known as the EUC Master Retreat) that is run by Steve Greenberg. If you don’t know who Steve is, let me just say that he is a legend in the EUC space and one of the most genuine, finest people that you could ever meet. This was an event that I had wanted to attend for many years, so I was very excited to finally get the opportunity.
Right off the bat during the opening keynote, I knew that this was something different. The focus was on the participant, finding the right event journey for you that would get you the most benefit. We were off to a flying start. What came next was something that I hadn’t experienced before. All the attendees sat in a large circle and if you wanted to pitch a session, you stood up and described to the group. It was then posted on the wall. We all received a strip of stickers with 9 gold stars on it and afterwards, you went to the wall and placed a star on the sessions that interested you the most. This set the agenda for the next two days. It was truly a conference that crowd sourced the content.
With the agenda set, it was time for dinner and each of the vendor sponsors had different options available to sign up for. I joined Login VSI for some good pizza and to hear Ron Oglesby take us through how to build a “bug out” bag. What is that you ask? It’s a bag that you have ready in your car should you find yourself in a situation where you need to make your way home and may need to survive for a day or two. The bag contains water, food, and medical supplies among other things. One item that really caught my eye was an encrypted hard drive that has all your important documents. Living in Ireland where we don’t have natural disasters often, it really did get me thinking about how this would make sense when you live somewhere that may be prone to flooding or tornadoes.
There are too many sessions to list them all but some of the highlights for me were:
- Measuring DEX in a scientific manner
- PowerShell coding standards
- Intel vGPU
- New Teams
- The future of application packaging
- Surviving Citrix Cloud outages
There was something for everyone. And, it was not just the session, there was also some great fun activities. We got to practice with a Japanese trained sword master, build a retro gaming console with Remko Weijnen, and my favourite of all, got to go off roading in the desert. It was an amazing event, and I would highly recommend it.
