It’s those little things in life that you come to be grateful for when you are staying in a different country and significantly helps make your trip more relaxing and enjoyable. A quick visit to Starbucks in the morning or being able to grab a half decent lunch in a nearby restaurant during the conference or simply popping into a nearby newsagent to grab a newspaper to read in your room in the evening just make the days away from home a little more bearable…
Sadly (for me) the hotel I am staying in is not only a good 15-20 minute walk from anywhere that fits these requirements, I am struggling to understand why there only seems to be only a single restaurant on site! If you are looking for a fast bite then forget it because this one is a fine dining experience (see 4 days of Dockercon – Day 0) and you will be looking at a minimum of a 2-hour eating experience. Given the hotel that I am staying in is joined to the conference venue, has a bedroom capacity of at least several thousand people, and the nearby area itself has a significant population (if the number of flats is any indication), the complete lack of nearby amenities is completely puzzling. Imagine for instance staying in the Seattle Sheraton hotel and then having to walk twice the distance from there to Pike Place Market to grab just a (decent) coffee! Yes that is exactly what I am facing but I’ll just have to learn to live with it.
Ok, so that is the moaning out of the way (for now at least) and today was Day 1 of Dockercon EU -or more precisely preconference workshop day. I awoke at 6.30 am, having burned the candle a little later than I intended (being the insomniac that I am) so I checked my emails and had a look at the Dockercon schedule. At first it appeared that all I needed to worry about was registration today, which was oddly running from 12 am onwards. Never mind I thought and grabbed another hour in bed…
When I woke again I decided to double check my emails and to my horror came across joining instructions for a Docker Workshop session! I was registered for the Swarm Orchestration: From Zero to Hero session, so hastily got washed and ready for my day ahead. My first hurdle was getting past the very long precon registration queue – which took approximately 15 minutes to get past! This process was a little odd given that organizers would have known how many people were attending and that the sessions were scheduled to start in minutes, but still it wasn’t quite as painful as it could have been.
As you might expect, pretty much the entire day was focused on Swarm management and deployment, and I felt that my registration fee was justified in minutes as we were given links to all training materials and more. The session was delivered in a hands-on style of “keep up if you can” which worked really well for the morning, but as the day went on (and the trainers delivery just got faster) I started to flag and fall behind. Most of the value for me was gained from the morning section, but at least I have the materials to go try this out at my leisure in private. I guess the area that I wished would have been covered (that was missing) was a discussion on (and comparison with) other orchestration and clustering platforms such as Kubernetes. That aside, it was a very worthwhile experience and the full value of attending is now down to me!
At the end of the day I decided that I needed to have an early night but was very hungry, so I bit the bullet and did my 20-minute walk to the shopping mall for a quite bite to eat. Tomorrow is the start of the main conference days -so I need my beauty sleep!
Other posts in this series
4 days of Dockercon – Day 4
4 days of Dockercon – Day 3
4 days of Dockercon – Day 2
4 days of Dockercon – Day 0
Filed under: Community, Events
