The 2022 DevIntersection Conference was held from April 3-8 in Las Vegas at the MGM Grand hotel. The conference is about Microsoft technologies such as C# programming, ASP.NET programming, SQL Server, Azure services, Office 365, and so on.

Bottom line: I thought it was an excellent event and I got a lot of value from it.

I estimate there were about 1,000 attendees, speakers, and exhibitors at DevIntersection. But I could be way off because the physical layout of the MGM Grand conference center makes it difficult to guess how many people were there.

Left: The main lobby area of the MGM Grand conference center. Right: The main ballroom where the keynote talks were presented.

I gave a talk titled “Introduction to PyTorch for .NET and SQL Developers”. I explained the basics of neural networks then talked a bit about the three standard examples: the Iris Dataset for tabular data classification, the MNIST dataset for image classification (I briefly mentioned CIFAR-10), and the IMDB movie review dataset for natural language processing (where I talked about LSTMs and TAs). The audience was very attentive and asked good questions.

The DevIntersection Conference had an Expo event. I estimate there were about 40 companies represented there. Sadly, I didn’t get much chance to explore the Expo. I wish I had more time. Expos can be very interesting.

Left: The room where I spoke at, before attendees arrived. Me after four days of no sleep. Right: The conference Expo.

Most of the attendees I talked to worked at medium-sized companies, but there were people from small companies and huge companies too.

Years ago, the main value delivered by technical conferences was education. But now essentially all knowledge is easily available on the Internet. Now, the main value of tech conferences (for me anyway) comes from the unplanned conversations I have with other attendees and speakers. I learned some valuable information that is directly applicable to my job.

Like most tech conferences now, DevIntersection had a few days of 8-hour workshops before and after the core event days of Tuesday through Thursday.

A secondary value of attending a tech conference is subjective: attendees return to work with renewed energy and enthusiasm, which leads to increased productivity and enhanced creativity. At least I do.

The city of Las Vegas is filled with tremendous energy and is constantly being revised. Left: The Marina Hotel once stood where the MGM Grand is now. Center: The Dunes Hotel once stood where the Bellagio is now. Right: The Sands Hotel once stood where the Venetian/Palazzo is now.