Coming off the tails of the hugely successful SQL Saturday Dublin events, Data Ceili – Dublin 2020 is shaping up to be Irelands largest Microsoft Data Platform event.
We still have till then end of Jan 2020 for speaker submissions and we have over 180 submissions from about 60 Local and International speakers. A who’s who of MVPs, experts and product team speakers to share their knowledge.
What has changed a lot since the first event in 2013 in Dublin is the sheer breadth of the Data Platform, hence the name change. This new style of event embraces the fact that modern data professional in Ireland use a diverse toolset including Power BI, Power Automate, Powershell, AI, ML, Bots, ADF, Containers Kubernetes, Databricks, Analysis services and more Azure features than one person can possibility master.
For me, I love getting an insight into emerging technologies which I’m not using yet, but plan to in the near future. I like speakers like Simon Whiteley who combine architectural principles I like such as meta data based frameworks to bleeding edge technologies like ADF and Databricks, which people are only just getting to grips with.
I also love taking a technology that I am weaker in (cough Powershell) and seeing how more dedicated veterans like Rob Sowell use it to a different level.
Often I will go an see a seasoned speaker like Kevin Kline, not so much about the topic, but more about improving the soft skills of delivery. Kevin is a god of the speaker world – I even saw him deliver a lightning talk at 10 seconds notice about a bar of chocolate of all things, with the entire audience transfixed.
Personally, much of the take away from an event this size for me, is also the people you meet: Speakers with new ideas, bumping into customers, and mixing with fellow data platform professionals. I’ve got multi-year projects on the back of events, found new employees and built a network of goto experts I can subcontract to when things need real specialists.
