TulsaTechFest 2007 a Smashing Success!
This is my long over due post regarding this year's TulsaTechFest. I have quite a few excuses like the long hours I worked on the MOSS and WSS projects mentioned in my previous post. Instead of spewing those, I will just try and post once a night until I get caught back up. I'm sure I'll have to skip a few, but I should be able to catch up quickly enough.
Building off last year's success for the first annual event with attendance then of approximately 360 on the Saturday only event, this year blew the lid off. This was our first attempt at charging and making it a Friday and Saturday event. We received overwhelming sponsorship support that we decided to refund the 200+ paid attendees and make the event free to all again. This pushed our pre-registration numbers to over 800. Organizers expected the actual attendance to be either evenly split or higher on Saturday and were surprisingly shocked. While we are still awaiting exact final counts, what we have so far is 650+ checked in on Friday and 400+ checked in on Saturday. While facilities cannot be booked until after the first of the year, we are already tentatively planning the dates for TulsaTechFest 2008 to be Thursday, October 16th and Friday, October 17th. We do still plan to include some content on Saturday, October 18th, but will probably consist of some deep dive training.
Lunch for 650+ people on Friday was an interesting feat and we narrowly squeaked by with the largest Domino's pizza order ever delivered at one time of 125 pizzas. We over compensated by ordering 175 pizzas on Saturday, then as we did last year, delivered the left overs to a nearby homeless shelter.
It was not surprising the event attracted so many people from surrounding states, considering we had 5 Microsoft employees presenting, over 15 Microsoft MVP's, with a total of 69 speakers, and 100 sessions. Details can still be found at www.tulsatechfest.com and details from the 2006 event can now be found here: 2006.tulsatechfest.com.
Technorati Tags:
TulsaTechFest,
TechFest,
MOSS,
WSS,
Sharepoint,
MVP,
Microsoft,
Event,
Community,
Influentials,
Training,
Presentations
Comment Notification
If you would like to receive an email when updates are made to this post, please register here
Subscribe to this post's comments using
Comments
Leave a Comment
About dwalker
David Walker has over 15 years experience in application development with over 50% of that employed as a consultant with companies such as: Texaco, Bank of Oklahoma, Winner Communications (ESPN.com) and IBM Global Services. At the age of 14, he began his application development ambitions with a Commodore 64, BASIC, and a 300 baud modem. Even at that early age, he primarily focused on two specific application types: multi-user communities and database applications.
His hunger to learn as much as possible about development lead him through courses such as DBase III, DBase IV, Pascal, C, C++, Java, and several in UNIX. He started his development career first doing heavy processing with Access and VBA, then moved on to VB 3, Oracle, and Delphi. Visual Basic was one environment that remained constant for many years, including his very first .NET projects performed in Visual Basic.NET.
After working several years on very high end internal Corporate applications, the consultant company he was working for, sought out his ideas for actual software products that could be packaged and sold. He had already developed several prototypes of a dynamic portal application, before portals even became popular, so this became the logic decision and he became the Director of Product Development. Under his direction, a team of developers and graphic artists, took a skinning approach before that become popular, and completed the core portal application, and continued on to developer 15+ add-on modules, including things such as: Help Desk Ticket Systems, Change Control, Records Management, Human Resources, and many more applications. Eventually, it spun off into it's own separate company as KnowledgeGEAR, a complete intranet in the box solution.
Having worked as a consultant, he has had a experience with a very wide range of applications and architectures, at one time, even converting several Fox Pro and GW-Basic applications to VB 6 and ASP. His early training of Unix and the C language and years of experience with JavaScript, lead him very quickly to C#, where he has remained focused ever since.
He is the current President of the
Tulsa Developers .NET user group.. He has been an MCP since 2003 and MCAD and MCSD since 2005. He is currently pursuing his MCDBA and then on to MCSE.