One week from now I’ll be in Austin as part of the Tech Field Day delegate crew for Tech Field Day 18. This is my second Field Day event having attended Cloud Field Day 4 in Silicon Valley last year. I remember being completely terrified going into the trip. I had no idea what to expect. Sure, I’d watched presentations over the internet for years, but I hadn’t considered what happened once the cameras stopped rolling. It’s also fair to say I suffered from a fair bit of impostor syndrome. I didn’t feel my voice was as strong as the other delegates’. I couldn’t have imaged the sense of camaraderie, conversations, and history gained from attending.. Long story short, it turned out to be one of the most fun work-ish experiences I’ve had in my adult life.

So here we are looking out at the near future. I have a bit of homework to do for prep. The vendors offer a mix of different technologies which is neat as it keeps things interesting. Datera, NetApp, SolarWinds, and VMware are all presenting. I’ve personally used / deployed / operated products from 3 of the four vendors. These are major vendors that all have a big foothold in existing datacenters. Each also has a cloud story to tell as they see customers increasingly adopt services in AWS, GCP, Azure, and OCP. While I’ve never used Datera’s products, I’m looking forward to learning more about them. For me, this event is about gleaming info about the strategies of these companies as much as it is about the tech.

I’ve collected a few links from TFD events past for review that highlight next week’s presenters.