At The Top Of The Summit

As I mentioned last time, I spent most of this week at Spark Summit in San Francisco (along with sampling custom Four Roses bottles and spending a fun evening feeling fragile and desperately hoping I wasn’t going to be sick). It was my first big conference! People from places like MapR, Cloudera, Ticketfly, LinkedIn, Netflix, Shopify, Google, and of course Databricks!

And what did I do?

Why, of course, I basically sat at the back for almost two days and barely talked to anybody. I did have a short, almost star-struck chat with Matei Zaharia (creator of Spark), but that was about it. In theory, I like the idea of conferences…but being so unable to talk to people, I might have been better off doing my usual thing and watching the talks when they go up online in a couple of weeks.

Still, despite all that, I did have a good time in San Francisco and the surrounding area (see the pictures in the last post). But I wish I was better at these things.

Back home, trying to catch up on sleep, failing, and wasting the weekend away. Another Sunday evening, it seems…