A View from the Air

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I have something exciting to tell you: THWACKcamp is not unique. Stick with me and I'll explain why.

After a hair-raising 37-minute flight connection, I'm comfortably (if somewhat breathlessly) settled into the last row of a tiny plane, which is currently between Houston and Cleveland. And despite the fact that I listened to Patrick's closing comments over five hours ago, it may as well have been five minutes ago. I'm still invigorated by the energy around THWACKcamp 2017: the energy from the teams that put together 18 incredible sessions; the energy from the 2,000+ online chatters who joined to offer their thoughts, comments, and opinions; and the energy from the room full of THWACK MVPs who showed up to take part in this event, which seems to have taken on a life of its own (not a bad thing, in my opinion).

It's going to take me a while to process everything I heard and saw over the last two days, from the acts of graciousness, support, and professionalism to the sheer brilliance of the presenters. There's so much that I want to try out.

I'm inspired more than ever to pick up Python, both for network projects and simply for the pure joy of learning a new coding language.

I have a renewed sense of urgency to get my hands dirty with containers and orchestration so that I can translate that experience into monitoring knowledge.

I'm committed to reaching out to our community to hear your stories and help you tell them, either by giving you a platform or by sharing your stories as part of larger narratives.

So, if there was so much SolarWinds-y, THWACK-y, Head Geek-y goodness, why would I start this blog by saying THWACKcamp is not unique? Because that sense of excitement, engagement, and invigoration is exactly how I feel when I attend the best IT shows out there. I felt it flying home from the juggernaut that was Microsoft Ignite, which boasted 27,000 attendees. I felt it driving back from the 400-person-strong inaugural DevOpsDays Baltimore. That tells me that THWACKcamp is not just a boutique conference for a certain subset of monitoring snobs and SolarWinds aficionados. It's a convention for ALL of us. While the focus is necessarily on monitoring, there are takeaways for IT pros working across the spectrum of IT disciplines, from storage to security to cloud and beyond.

In short, THWACKcamp has arrived. I'll leave it to others to recount the numbers, but, by my count, attendance was in the thousands. That's nothing to sneeze at, and that's before you consider that it's free and 100% online, so many of the barriers for people to attend are removed.

I have to admit: my first sentence is deceptive. We ARE unique. At all those other shows I've been to, I have to wait weeks or months to be able to view sessions I regretfully missed at the time, or to review sessions for quotes or other things I might have missed. THWACKcamp is different. You can access all of that content NOW.

That's not exactly a groundbreaking technological feat, but it is unique in the industry. And more than that, it's refreshing.

So check out the sessions. Give them a re-listen and see if you catch another nugget of knowledge you missed the first time around. Share them with your teams. Come back to them whenever you want (just like you can do for THWACKcamp 2017 (THWACKcamp 2017 ) or past events:

Meanwhile, I'm already looking forward to THWACKcamp 2018. I know there are going to be some amazing technologies to share, features to dive into, and stories to tell.

Until then!

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