Write about your Summit experience!

[Monique vdB]

Summit is amazing and often overwhelming, and no two people have the same experience. For this task, I invite you to write a post (or post in the thread below) reflecting on what you got out of this year's Summit. 

I started writing this prompt and it turned into a poem so I went with it. Need inspiration? here you go:

Who did you meet? What did you eat?

What big announcements did you think were neat?

Did you go to some talks? Take some long Vegas walks? 

Bring home awesome swag like some shirts or some socks?

Did you get product news? Did you visit some booths?

Did you dance to the sound of the B-52s?

And did writing this post help your post-Summit blues?

Tell us your takeaways, we want to hear!

And let's do it all again sometime next year. 😉

Me and all my friends hanging out at Summit

[Kimberly Deal _Columbus ACE_]

Your poem brought a smile, you presences missed by miles.

*grins*  I can't poem.  So a one liner is all you get.  :)  will tell you all about our adventures soon.

[Monique vdB]

It is just fine

If your poem's one line

Mine will be two

P.S. I treasure you

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Here's our daily wrapup blog posts for Wednesday and Thursday.

Summit Bash EPIC!

Bourbon Bar dinner awesome!

I have no more voice. 

(my feeble attempt at a haiku)

[Monique vdB]

You had a MAGICIAN? Amazing!!

[Dave Theodore [Coyote Creek Consulting]]

Yeah. He was really good too. Very funny and engaging. We were right in front of the Community booth too.

[Max Foerster - K15t]

Bash was awesome and wild! :D

[Jack Brickey]

Picture a dense fog in the streets of London and you have an idea of the inside of my head at the moment.

It was a really great Summit and if you weren't there but followed along in Slack summit2019 channel you should have a pretty good idea of this! Here are some of my key take-aways:

• Vegas venue is Huge - if you ever feel guilty for not getting that daily exercise in, Summit Vegas will fix that right up.

• Community Day - another awesome event packed full of activities, presentations and fun. The big announcement, as we all know by now, is that we have taken an important step forward toward bringing the User Group leaders and Community champions more closely together with our new branding: Community Leaders & Community Events. I enjoyed presenting at the event and plan to give a repeat performance for the Austin Community Event on the 26th of this month. Ultimately, I will be turning it into an article here in the Community. 
• OPEN - the them of this Summit was all about being open and how this openness encourages high performing teams that are happier and work well together.
• Cloud Focus - following suit with the past few Summits where Cloud is a major initiative for Atlassian, 2019 messaging conveyed this in spades (see what I did there?). That said, I was pleased w/ some strong focus on Server/Data Center and I heard this from others too.
• Next-gen - aligned w/ the Cloud focus, Next-gen is going to be the future for Cloud. We caught a glimpse of NG for JSD and I have setup early access to take it for a spin. There appears to be some “workflow” configuration aspects built in here which is encouraging. The bottomline is that Atlassian wants to continue to build NG out to where it would become the solution of choice (my interpretation but seems clear to me).
• Jira OPS - this is disappearing as a standalone product but all the goodness I think is still there where it relates to Incident Management thru integrations w/ JSD, Statuspage, OpsGenie, Slack/Teams. I’m really encouraged by the focus on Incident Management integrations. I’m seeing some nice stuff here.
• Talks - There were some really great talks and our very own Russell Zera did a great talk on his journey from Server to Cloud. Once available online, I highly recommend it for those considering this. I sure hope he made his 6am post-BASH flight! ;-)
• Food …. Lots of Food
• Beverages ….. Lots of Beverage
• BASH- In a word - Awesome! The venue was great, right on the beach w/ the Spazmatics and B52 playing on a stage right in the pool. There was a lot of wet dancing going on. 🙂The Community had a really nice dedicated area upstairs overlooking the beach stocked well with, yep…food and beverages! While the official event ended at 11 some of us carried it on into the wee-hours. More dancing, singing and fun was had by all! Can’t wait for the photos w/ the B52s to get posted. ;-)

A big thank you to the Atlassian Community Team for all their efforts to make the event awesome for us and their sincere appreciation for what the Community Leaders do in our Community Events and here in the online Community.

Cheers!

[Bastian Stehmann]

Meeting Mike and Scott was great.

And there was so much food, and I tried to taste it all, can't list all that and now definitely have to loose some weight again.

And the most important announcement for me was the clear statement to cloud (although I personally don't like it so much).

[David Mayer]

The opening DJ's both the Tuesday evening and Thursday morning were awesome, and that little girl has some wicked talent/future. I liked how Atlassian kind of molded all the presentations/demo's to adhere to their culture which was pretty cool! Even though these people didn't work for Atlassian, they kind of portrayed the mentality like they were 100% invested in the products and really energetic to explain how they used them.

Met so many people from across the world and from various organizations. Got to put a lot of faces to names that I have only talked to over messages or support tickets. Bonus I got to see Steven Tyler walking through Mandalay Bay!

I really enjoyed the presentation on Jira Agile and the Modern Methodology in the Age of Disruption was my favorite presentation of the Summit.

The first General Session with the motivational speaker was good, I felt he was rushed a little bit or had a lot on his mind to get out because he spoke really fast! It all made sense though and the exercises were really cool.

I got a lot of swag but not as much as others; not sure how they did that! I was too busy in the break out sessions. Still scored some sweet soft tee shirts and socks to share with my team back in Florida.

The JIRA product session was great and went will with the overall feel of the conference. I wish the ShipIt program was more all teams on the same mission/objective, instead of three different idea's, but still pretty cool to see the young minds put it together.

Was pretty funny going to the bathroom at Bash and the guy's having a line while the girls did not, but its to be expected at a software conference! the B-52's sounded just like they did way back when they first recorded their songs, so that was pretty cool. The band before though was really good as well. The party carried on to Ri Ra and was awesome seeing someone get engaged after Bash.

[Mirek]

After 50+ hours of travel overall, 100 000+ steps, 2kg more on my weight ( because of great food and beverages in US of course ;) ) .. I can say that it was a very good Summit for me. Everyone I think found something interesing to see, hear or do. Many first summit timers which is nice. I had my own personal goals that were achieved and of course I met a lot of great people (especially all Community Leaders and Staff).  Finally my bag was filled in 110% because of all that swag :) 

However on the other side (for me personally) a little bit of rush if you want to get on a talk and on the same time want to get in touch with someone in the Expo Hall. I missed few talks because of that - good that those are recorded, so now I can catch up on all of them. 

And what I really did not like was the event app. It was prepared too late and had many anoying bugs (at least on my phones - both on Android).  On one of them it was slowing down the phone really heavily and on the end crashed, so I installed it on the second one on which first I was not able to log in - support team at registration helped me here which was good. It was better on performence but not on features.. many time the messages were not delivered after notification, I removed by mistake Community event and was not able to bring it back.. really bad filtering on Attendee list (4500 of them!) , there were some junk left in the app like "Test" and "Test2" events.. map was vanishing when zooming, so really hard to navigate, need to scroll the post again to catch up those that were not reviewed by me.. etc. There is a lot of room for improvement here. Maybe on IOS it was better but just giving my general feedback. Hope it would be better (with a lot of new features) next year. 

Other than that I do not see anything else bad. I am back home safely with power mode on and a lot of ideas, so that is the biggest takeaway for me overall.

See you on next Summit! I hope.. :) 

[BiancaE]

I'm learning so much! Taking notes for next year.

[Jimmy Seddon]

I wrote a series of blog posts at work describing my experiences on a daily basis, with a final wrap up which I was waiting for my flight in the airport on the Friday.  Here's the content of that final post:

For anyone that has been following this entire blog series you know just how much I have been involved with over the past week.

It started with a fantastic training course for which I will be taking the certification exam at some point in the near future the cost vs value for that course alone is amazing!  Gettting it as an add-on to the Conference cost us $300, that course is normally $750.  It also includes a voucher for a free attempt that the Project Administration Certification exam that would cost $150 if you didn't take the course.  Aside from becoming an Atlassian Community Champion (you can take all certification exams for free).  I think this is the best value for taking Atlassian University courses, especially if you are looking to become Atlassian Certified.

Next, were the sessions.  There were some fantastic ones, and some not so fantastic ones.  If the sessions were all that we cared about, I would suggest that we simply sign up the the live stream (which is free) and watch the sessions that we think would be beneficial.  On that note recorded versions of all the General & Breakout Sessions have been posted here: https://www.atlassian.com/company/events/summit/watch-sessions/2019/general-session/general-session-the-possibility-of-teams 

If anyone is interested in seeing any of the sessions I attended or perhaps any of the other sessions they recorded that interest you I wasn't able to attend I encourage you to check them out.

Now we get into the real meat where I think the true value of the Summit is.  At the first timer's welcome reception, there was a statement may to the group "You can learn a Summit's worth of information simply by taking to people at the various vendor booths and networking with other Atlassian Administrators".  I didn't think much of it at the time, but I can honestly say that if I were given the opportunity to go back *cough* it will be in Las Vegas again next year *cough* I would definately spend more time taking to fellow admins as they were fantasitic as sharing their experiences and would advocate for various vendors that have helped them and then I was able to go to the vendor booths to learn about what it was that they do to make the Atlassian tools better.

In colcusion, this was a fantastic experience.  I learned so much, I met a number of fellow admins (who are all LinkedIn connections) and all of them are part of either a local user group or the online community so having someone else to bounce ideas off in the future will be even easier than before.  I also learned just how invested Atlassian is in making sure they provide the right set of tools to meet the individual customer's needs. Hence why I had five Atlassian staff members attention while I explained our current state, where we want to go, and was looking for advice on the best way to get there.

Would I got again? Absolutely! (if Norma let me) The value provided by the in person interactions is what made this the most valuable and rewarding experince for in my opinion.  In additional, becuase of this realization, I'm going to make more of an effort to ensure that Igloo remains a very active member in the local Atlassian User Group and if the opporunity comes up to take over at the local User Group Leader, I might actually take the position.  At the same time, I'm going to start being more active on the online community.  In speaking with a number of community champions, the best way to "study" for the certification exam is by helping others solve their problems on the online forums.

If you have any questions about anything or everything that I experienced both at the conference and on the Vegas strip.  You know where to find me!

[Kat Warner]

Who did you meet? What did you eat?

I met a lot of wonderful people in real life that already felt like friends from the community.

On Tuesday I ate something or some things that triggered an allergic reaction which was less than ideal but I sussed out my food choices by Wednesday.

What big announcements did you think were neat?

I'm excited to learn that Certified Master is something coming soon for those with 4 or more certifications.

Did you go to some talks? Take some long Vegas walks? 

I underestimated how much is going on at Summit so I was only able to attend a couple of talks on Partner Day. It was great to be able to hear some announcements live.

Normally reaching 5000 steps is a good day so I'd say there were some long walks in Las Vegas!. The final count for Friday was in excess of 73,000 steps!

Bring home awesome swag like some shirts or some socks?

I made sure I collected plenty to share with my team and some of their children.

Did you get product news? Did you visit some booths?

There is a nifty Confluence Server to Confluence Cloud migration tool available soon.

I wanted to visit every booth on my breaks from being at booth 302 for TechTime. It was impossible to get around all the sponsor booths on the first day so in the end, I barely spent any time at the Atlassian product booths.

Did you dance to the sound of the B-52s?

Yeah, I did! This was epic.

And did writing this post help your post-Summit blues?

Life is very busy at the office which is combining with public holidays to make sure Summit 19 is part of my work day for a few more weeks at least. It will be a while before post-Summit blues have a chance to appear ... and Summit 2020 is less than a year away.

I did have Summit blues when I realised I was so busy that I was unable to log into this Community for days!

[Fadoua]

Good day,

Not knowing where to start from, however all I am sure about is the down feeling I get every time the count down to the end of Atlassian Summit starts.

The minute I landed in Vegas, my fear of flying, my tiredness, and long wait were gone. I was surprised to feel ready to attend my very first session not even 1.5h after making it to NV.

This was my first time attending the Community Day. What a day!!!! Meeting in-person with other community leaders who share the same values, meeting with the Atlassian Team (Minus @Erica Moss and @Monique vdB 😢 ) was great (finally real faces not avatars or pictures), and learning some very good techniques in general to master both AUG meetups and helping others in the community.

I planned time ahead the sessions I wanted to attend. the fun part that I call (shopping) is going through the booths and collecting swags. It was worth it as I can not describe my co-workers joy when I handed them their swag. They all think that Atlassian and its partners are the best when it comes to swags.

Then comes the diner with the founders, Atlassian Team, and other awesome Community Leaders. It was like a dream.

Finally BASH, what a great idea having it on the very last day.

Walking daily from Tropicana to the Mandalay was fun, but walking again all the way to the conference rooms was exhausting. I too felt like losing weight with all the walking in the Mandalay Bay and the strip.

What a rewarding experience!!! Networking, learning, "Shopping" 🤪, and having fun. I can fill pages and pages with my great experience, however I hope that lot of people will get to experience it as well. The one decision I made a long time ago is that if my employer decides to don't cover for my trip. I am taking my vacation time and paying from my pocket to attend the Summit. While waiting for the next one, I hope you all have a successful year full with achievements both personally and professionally. I hope we get to meet again in the upcoming years.

Best

Fadoua

[Jodi LeBlanc]

I finally wrote about my (virtual) summit experience! :)

https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Trello-articles/My-Virtual-Summit-Experience/ba-p/1072005

[Dam - iDalko]

no word just a pic :)