Hello World Road Trip - So Far

We’re in San Francisco today and I thought it would be a good time to write a quick update to the trip. As some of you know, we’re currently in the middle of a twenty-five city trip and so far so good.

Tomorrow night we do the event here in San Francisco (with the amazing Beth Massi as our guest) and I’m excited to do our sixth event. It’s been an amazing couple of weeks and we can’t wait for the rest of the trip to unfold.

Me and my wife are travelling to each city to put on the road trip and we’ve done events in Atlanta, Birmingham, Austin, Phoenix, and San Diego. I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Wooley, Todd Miranda, Rod Paddock, Joe Guadagno, and Tim Huckaby so far.

I’m really excited by the support I’ve gotten from all our sponsors (including Pluralsight, Infragistics, DevExpress, Telerik, and GrapeCity). So far we’ve given away over $35,000 in prizes from our sponsors.

Here are a few thoughts about every stop:

Atlanta

When I started our first event, I told the attendees that they were the beta testers. I didn’t know how true that was. Jim Wooley and I recorded a great talk but little did I know at the time that I forgot to press record when we started the podcast. Lucky for me I was still home and plied him with BBQ to come by the house and re-record the podcast with an audience of two (our wives).

Birmingham

Out of Atlanta, we headed for Alabama and the first actual road stop. We had an enthusiastic group and they asked great questions during my ASP.NET Core talk. Todd had a great story (his podcast comes out tomorrow) and loved his opinions about being a manager of developers.

Austin

We were excited about making a stop in Austin to try their legendary BBQ. You might not know this, but the amazing Fox Brothers BBQ in Atlanta in literally out our backyard so we love our BBQ. Austin didn’t disappoint. Our stop in Austin was complete with Rod Paddock’s great interview that covered his love of writing and development and how he’s mixed the two masterfully.

Phoenix

We were really glad to get to Phoenix so we could put our jackets away for a couple of stops. We visited the great Music Instrument Museum and then headed over for our event in Phoenix. This stop was marred by a very late delivery of pizza and a schedule mistake on my part so the audience was antsy for us to start. Joe Guadagno saved the day with his compelling story of how he got started.

San Diego

Finally, in San Diego we were lucky to find a twelve hour window when Tim Huckaby was home and got his story of how he got started. He really compelled me to start looking at the Hololens as the real deal. If only someone could give me the 3K to get the developer edition.

So that’s the story so far. If you want to see what cities we’re headed to, go visit the road trip site here:

http://hwroadtrip.com

Don’t forget, you can see the code from the demos of all the stops of the road trip here:

https://github.com/shawnwildermuth/HWRoadTripDemos

Thanks to all the great guests and attendees for making our road trip a fun success. See you at your city coming soon!