Community, Tech Field Day

Cloud Field Day 4 – Thoughts from a first time delegate

Posted on by Liselotte

What an awesome week I just had – I returned with great inspiration and am in awe of the creativeness and visions from the many startups I met as a Tech Field Day delegate in Silicon Valley.

Tech Field Day is a well-known series of tech events and is very respected in the tech community. I’ve been looking at the videos thinking this event was out of my league. It never occurred to me that I could be part of this group of people being presented to small startups from Silicon Valley. Just before my summer holiday Andrea Mauro and Pietro Piutti both encouraged me to apply (thank you so much guys). I took a deep breath and completed the form and by much surprise I was invited by Stephen Foskett to join CFD4!

I experienced so much the last few days and this will just cover some of the highlights. I’m working on a blog post on the sessions including videos of the presentations.

Several startups and HQ visits

What I find very unique to the Tech Field Day concept is that you’re presented to not just one but several and very different technologies. We got insight into the many angles of the Multi-Cloud world including: Networking, Storage, Backup and Security. We did not just stay in one place but visited several office spaces. These visits added that extra something as all HQs represented a different culture.

Docker

This was just a friendly visit and we had no presentations, but this definitely has to be added to one of my highlights as I was welcomed in the reception by very familiar Danish products: LEGO and Mærsk. Who doesn’t love LEGO? I’ve been so lucky to visit my community friends at LEGO HQ and I have seen many LEGO combinations, but I’ve never before seen the formation as a whale.

Women in Tech

I’m always excited to meet other women in the tech field. This is something that makes me smile and wanting me to give high fives. I especially want to highlight two profiles from my visit in Silicon Valley:

Claudia Eyzaguirre – CEO and co-founder of PVComplete

I spent a few hours in San Francisco prior to the Tech Field Day and I met Claudia for lunch. A few months back I sat next to Claudia on a plane to Ravello Blogger Day 2 in Palo Alto. I don’t recall working or watching any movies on this flight as we talked all the way to San Francisco. Claudia is the co-founder and CEO of PVComplete – a solar system design startup. She is a great inspiration and I recognized many of the same values regarding work/life balance and wanting to invite more women to this space.

Sherry Wei – CTO and founder of Aviatrix Systems

On the first day of CFD4 we had the pleasure of listening to the founder of Aviatrix Systems. Aviatrix is a startup founded in 2014 by Sherry Wei. Before attending CFD4 I watched videos of previous presentations and I was amazed by her. Seeing her presentation at Cloud Field Day 4 made me respect her even more – she is a natural and confident presenter. As founder of the startup she knows every corner of her product. This session was one of the most interactive as she made all the delegates curious to know more about how Aviatrix systems simplifies the connectivity to the cloud (AWS, Azure and Google) in hybrid and multi-cloud environments (More about this system in my future blog post but until then look at this company overview).

SETI institute (Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence)

This visit deserves its own chapter: Wednesday afternoon when the official program for CFD4 was completed, Stephen Foskett and Tom Hollingworth had arranged a visit to SETI institute. As far as I know the institute usually doesn´t do tours but somehow Stephen and Tom convinced them to let us in.

I expect the readers to be fellow geeks, so I’m sure you all know SETI institute. In case you don’t: SETI is a non-profit scientific research institute with the mission to explore, understand and explain the origin and nature of life in the universe and the evolution of intelligence (well, actually we learned that they used to search for intelligent life on other planets but now they just search for any kind of life on one of the trillion planets in the Milky Way) . We had a guided tour of SETI by Senior Astronomer, Seth Shotak. He gave an interesting tour of the premises and we met researchers and learned about the overall work of SETI. I think we could’ve stayed all week listening to him talk passionately about his work. Now I know what I want to be when I grow up!

I got so impressed and enthusiastic about the whole mission that I bought some swag – next time you see me I will be dressed in full SETI outfit.

Seth Shotak has a weekly broadcast/podcast called “Big Picture Science” and you can hear very interesting science chapters on iTunes or your most preferred Podcast app.

 

Want to join Tech Field Day?

If you’re a blogger and active on SoMe you really should apply to attend this event. Yes, I know. You think you’re supposed to know more, have more followers etc. etc. but please – take a deep breath and jump right into it. What is the worst thing that can happen? You can fill out the application here.

Note: I was invited to join Tech Field Day and my travel and hotel was sponsored.