A wrap-up of my April travel

Wow… what a month of April.  If you have been following me on Twitter or Foursquare, you know that I’ve done a bit of travelling and a bit of speaking this past month.  This is the wrap-up of those events, and a look ahead at my future schedule.

First Stop… Boston!

For the first week of April, I spent three days in Boston at the Telerik home office and in a private company event.  I got to present to some guests at this event, and spend some time with the most of the Telerik DevTools Developer Evangelists.  It was a good couple of days to recharge my batteries on Telerik products and work with my team.  I met a number of really great people in our technical community that I really need to ensure I keep in touch with.  I can’t say too much more about this event, but you will be seeing the fruits of it in the weeks and months ahead.

April 9 – Pittsburgh.Net

On the 9th, I drove across the commonwealth of Pennsylvania to Pittsburgh to speak to the Pittsburgh.Net user group.  This group meets in the Microsoft office that resides in the shadows of Heinz Field (home of the Steelers) and PNC Park (home of the Pirates).  The 60 developers in attendance gave me their ears for 90 minutes and I gave the first run of my One ASP.Net presentation.  This presentation was going to run a bit longer than I expected, and I ended up cutting some of my demos in favor of pre-written code.

The group enjoyed my presentation and wrote as such on their Meetup website.  Thank you Pittsburgh.Net for your hospitality!

April 17 – Philly.Net

It was time for some home cooking, and I had a session at my home user group – Philly.Net.   This group always turns out for good content, and this evening was no exception.  120 people registered and it was standing room only for this evening.  My buddy John Petersen spoke for the first half of the evening on the cool new features in ASP.Net 2012.2 and then I got to give my One ASP.Net talk in the remaining 45 minutes.  I cut my talk down even further from the Pittsburgh session, and managed to squeeze in all of the topics I wanted to cover.

It is always great to speak to this group, not just because I know so many of them, but because they REALLY know their stuff.  The questions from the Philadelphia crew are always very deep, and they’re not afraid to tell you their opinion.  I received a suggestion during my session to assemble some of the content that I had with some sample code, scripts, and how-tos into a unified resource that developers and project managers could reference when making decisions about employing hybrid-ASP.Net techniques.  This is a brilliant idea, and you will see the results of that effort in the next week or two.

April 23 – CapArea.Net

My final visit of the month was in the Washington DC suburbs for the CapArea.Net user group.  This was a very curious group that was just coming off of a weekend with their Code Camp.  About 30 people showed up for my talk about One ASP.Net and this time I had a full two hours to present the content.  I put all of my demos into this one, and still came up short on time.  I guess its better to have more content and not need it, than to run out of things to talk about…

This group was very interested in Telerik and our products.  I was afraid that I turned the end of the session into a bit of a sales pitch, but the group seemed very interested, and for that I thank them.

Home, for now…

After those four user groups, my family is ready for me to be home for a bit.  This won’t last too long, as I have visits on the books for Arizona, New Orleans, Northern New Jersey, and Tennessee in the months ahead.  I’m also looking at some other interesting groups in the Southwest and Midwest, planning a possible pair of road trips.