Bron Thulke - Web Developer
Experiences at the 2024 Microsoft AI Tour in Sydney
This week was a lot of firsts for me - I took my first trip to Sydney in over 5 years, to visit my first large Microsoft event, volunteers for the first time helping run some of the workshop events, as a first time MVP! PHEW!
I arrived in Sydney on Tuesday, the day before the conference, and took the opportunity to jump off the train earlier, at Circular Quay, to take in the spectacular sights of the Sydney Opera House and the Sydney Harbour Bridge (yes I’ve seen it all a hundred times before, but it still takes my breath away every time).
I then headed to my hotel, stopping by to collect my badge for the event since that was possible the day before for helpers. I had heard that the morning-of could be chaotic, so figured I’d take advantage of being there early. In reality, from what I saw on the day they generally kept things moving smoothly, impressive to see!
Microsoft Reactor events to kick off the learning
That evening I headed to a couple of little side events at the Microsoft Reactor. One being an AI related discussion for MVPs and RDs which was a great lead into the next day. The other was a .NET catch up where we heard from Orin Thomas about voice and video avatars for AI generated content, and then Arafat Tehsin gave a demo of Semantic Kernal, which was another perfect segway into a lot of the developer content planned for the next day. I especially enjoyed watching how he utilised Interactive Notebooks in VS Code for the demo, which is a tool I use extensively for pulling together instructional documentation with actual scripts for processes I run in my day to day work, so I can hand them over to others team members, too - it’s great to see when more uses of it.
It was so fabulous to get to see some familiar faces and also meet other MVPs and Microsoft staff face to face, some of whom I’ve been chatting with for years before!
It’s conference day
On Wednesday morning I arrived at the International Convention Centre at around 7.30an, met up with my friend Lars (yep that guy, don’t you know who he is??), who kindly became my unofficial chauffer for the next hour, as we wandered around the expo hall and met with loads of people - some of whom I knew and was finally able to meet IRL, and many I was getting to meet for the first time.
Formal kick-off with the Keynote
On to the keynote! It wasn’t until we entered the theatre itself that i realised just how big the event was. I already knew it was to be around 6,000 attendees, but it just didn’t click on my brain how many people that is, until I saw the huge space with what seemed like not a single seat free.
The keynote itself was right provoking from a business and opportunities perspective, but also included technical demos that actually ended up being perfect paths to the workshops that I would later watch and then help run.
Adventure time
By that point I had got my bearings and was ready to run off by myself. I attended a workshop by Seth Juarez, who I’d seen many times in virtual conference talks and presentations, and although I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself afterwards, he was an inspiration to watch speaking. His workshop was about Prompty and using it to integrate with Azure AI - little did I know that this was actually the perfect lead in to the workshop that I was proctoring later on!
Lunch was next, and I grabbed a delicious grilled chicken salad that included enough greens to make me feel healthy, and I grabbed a space out in the promenade and caught up on work conversations while I ate. I decided not to try to engage in conversation with anyone at that point because I did just need the chill time with my own thoughts.
After eating, I headed to Rick Claus’s talk on Leveraging AI for Infrastructure Management. Since I work in Azure for a large chunk of my day, and have in all honestly found little value so far in the Microsoft Copilot for Azure, I was keen to see how I COULD be using it better. The talk didn’t disappoint and I’m keen to get back and start some new tricks that I picked up.
I then headed back to the expo hall to have more of a wander around, chatted with Microsoft peeps about how we could be using Copilot in our business without it costing more than our monthly hosting (seriously, its a big issue for a small startup, but the #1 message I got which I’ll be taking back is “start small and watch how it’s value add can grow”). I’m also excited to look into the capabilities that he mentioned for Copilot to assist with the labelling of files for sensitivity, to for helping with Data Security Posture Management
Now my own showtime - proctoring some workshops
I had volunteered to help run some workshops on the day, and was excited to be selected to Proctor two workshops on the same topic, being about building a co-pilot into a retail app code-first, using Azure AI and Prompty.
Having already played with Semantic Kernal to create a copilot the last few months, including doing a quick talk about it at Melb.Net After Party that we ran for Microsoft Build, I had partly expected that I might already know a lot of the content. However, Prompty is completely new to me and as I started running through the workshop myself in the days leading up to the event. I became very excited about the potential for this little tool to make a big difference, helping to rapidly create co-pilots in code, including ideation and testing.
I’m also excited to be presenting a workshop at next year’s NDC Melbourne about building a personal assistant with Semantic Kernal, so of course I was also soaking in ideas and inspiration for the content for that at the same time.
The workshop itself ran very smoothly, there was a large variety of attendees with some never having coded before, all the way through to some who were experienced enough to just do the workshop themselves at their own pace. The workshop was fun by David Smith, a Microsoft Developer Advocate Lead who had made the trip over from America. David provided an introduction for everybody and then proceeded to work his way through the workshop himself so that those who weren’t quite ready to run along by themselves could just watch and learn from his doing. Meanwhile, the two of us who were proctoring walked around the room helping people individually as they needed it, and it was great to see attendees learning so much along the way, not just even about the actual integration with the LLM and creation of the copilot, but even just learning tips for using VS Code, terminal and GitHub.
After one of the workshops, I was talking with two attendees who I had engaged with a lot during the previous hour, and I shared my details with them, offering help if they continue the workshop afterwards as a self-guided lab. They both laughed when I did that, and said that I might regret the offer, but I quickly eased their minds about that - being able to help others is one of the best parts of what I do!!
That was a wrap
After the last workshop, the conference centre emptied out quickly. I went on to have a lovely dinner and drinks with some friends, again getting the opportunity to meet and connect with more people along the way and widening my network of awesome peeps that I hope to see again at future events.
Overall, I had an absolutely brilliant time and am so glad I made the trip up to Sydney, not just for the AI Tour itself, but honestly probably more so for the opportunity to network and connect with so many people and experience a larger scale conference like that.
Now I’m back home and having a much-needed rest, and looking forward to my next Microsoft event, the MVP Summit in March 2025!!