Yesterday I got back from Milan after some great days, packed with awesome sessions and meeting even more awesome people. As it was the first time for me attending Directions EMEA (or any Directions for that matter) I want to sum up my impressions of this.
I have to be honest: it was a bit unfamiliar being together with so many people after more than 1,5 years of Covid restraints. But that probably made it even better. I genuinely enjoyed meeting so many of you there in person. And since everyone was either vaccinated or tested it was just nice to also share some hugs and handshakes – although I lost count how many times people (me included) were confused if they should do a classical handshake or just a “fist-bump” 🤜🤛
After getting our badges we started on Tuesday with a small warm-up group of some #BCBeerinar participants (thanks to Krzysztof “KB” Bialowas, as the founder of #BCBeerinar)
Wednesday started with the Keynote from Christian Sega, Vicky Critchley, Mike Morton, Horina Serbanescu and Jannik Bausager to set the scene for the upcoming days (I hope I didn’t forget anyone)
After that I joined the sessions from Esben Nyhuss Kristoffersen and Peter Borring (“What’s new: VS Code and AL“), then the IT.Integro session on “Advanced Intercompany“, which was followed by Stefano Demilianis great session about creating serverless enterprise cloud workflows for D365BC. Besides many, many great talks in between the sessions (not only to distract from the food catering 😉) the sessions “Can BC SaaS handle large customers?” (with Christian Heide Damm and Rayner Vaz) and “Background task processing” (from Agnieszka Potulska-Tylenda and Darrick Joo – also both from MSFT) brought a great ending for the sessions of the 1st day.
On day 2 I attended less sessions to be honest. That was mostly because I was just too nervous 🙈 It all started again with some great intro during the Keynote of what to expect next from Mike Morton, Dmitry Chadayev and Peter Borring. It was also very nice to see one of our companies product featured during that keynote (if you want to know more about the Digital Consultant, check it out here). But I also knew they were about to show a little video contribution from myself – but I didn’t know when.
At some point it started and I have to say: it was really weird seeing myself on this huge screen. I made a recording of it with my phone, but I’m not sure if the image stabilizer could counter my shaking 🙈 Waldo was able to take a good picture from a good angle of it (source here):
Right after the keynote was the “Together we win – Success through open source“-session from Maria, Jesper and me. Here I was even more nervous in the beginning, since it was not only the first time for me attending Directions EMEA but also the 1st time standing on stage during such an event.
In hindsight all the nervousness was really unnecessary. It was a really nice and friendly crowd and we also had some good talks afterwards. But after that I needed to take a break – even though I’d miss out on some great sessions. But the tension/excitement of the last hours were just a bit much. Gladly I still had a chance later to join Vjekos session (“Branching by abstraction“), Kamils session regarding “Architecture of PTEs” and Tobias‘ session about “Azure DevOps web extensions“.
On day 3 the highlight during the keynote were the two community awards. One is the community-focused learning portal UseDynamics.com. I was totally unaware about this and really like Abakions initiative here. The award in the tech-category went to the team around my colleague Tobias Fenster for their Azure DevOps & Docker Self-service solution. Since I use this solution on a daily basis I might be a bit biased, but it’s really a great and innovative time-saving solution I can only recommend.
I also like to point out to the Women in Dynamics iniative that Vicky mentioned. Personally I’m very happy that COSMO CONSULT already achieved an above-average quota of female employees (30% at COSMO, compared to industry-wide ~20%). Since I’m really no expert in this area I’d just like to offer whatever assistance I can give on this matter. If anyone has advice for me on what I can do to get this quota to 50% I’m happy to listen and act 🤗
Lastly, I just want to thank you all for a great time in Milan. It was great meeting you all and it was great to learn so much (and put so much additional stuff still to learn on my list). I’m already looking forward meeting you all again on the next Directions EMEA 😊 It was also great seeing so many of my colleagues from COSMO entities around the continent in Milan – already looking forward to the next COSMOCon!
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