Welcome to William's ekasi

I’m sitting on a very full Boeing on the way back to Johannesburg.  I’m tired, I’m happy, I’m excited and I’m a little smarter than I was at the start of the week.  I’m also bent over my keyboard with little T-Rex arms – no working room in economy.

TechEd 2011 was a great conference.  Not only was it the first TechEd that I presented at, but we also had some fantastic international speakers coming too.  There’s a whole bunch of stats and things I found interesting below, just keep in mind this is my own interpretation of the sessions. Nothing official!  It also doesn’t include any whiteboard sessions.

Session Breakdowns

This year there were 85 IT Pro sessions and 74 Developer sessions.  A pretty even breakdown.  The Both category (only 4) are sessions that I think both professions would have gotten benefit from.  I’ve excluded the partner summit sessions from these stats.

I distinctly remember going through the session catalogue thinking that there weren’t that many developer sessions so I’m a little surprised that the split was actually so even.

Looking a little deeper into the dev sessions though, the topics covered by each is a little more telling:

First thing that grabbed my attention is that there was only 1 security session for developers.  That probably resonated with me because I was the presenter of that session.  I wonder if there isn’t more of a need for developer focused security sessions?

The next interesting bit is that SQL and BI makes up more than a quarter of the developer sessions.  This is probably due to Denali CTPs.  A lot of BI guys tend to specialize in that space, so how much other value did they get from TechEd?

There were only 8 windows phone sessions.  With Nokia World coming up next week I would have expected a lot more phone sessions – especially since they flew 2 international speakers out to talk about Windows Phone.

Cloud computing also seemed a little low to me for it’s importance.  This might have to do with the state of Flux of cloud computing in South Africa though.

Other than the very low and very high sessions, it felt relatively balanced to me.  Comparing this to the IT Pro sessions shows a completely different focus:

Only 2 SQL sessions, compared to 13 for the developer track.  9 Security sessions, compared to 1.  1 Phone session, compared to 8.  There’s also a bigger variance than the developer tracks.

Interesting, isn’t it?