Architect Forum 2005/2005 - Istanbul

Last week, Beat and I delivered the first event in Microsoft EMEA's 2005/2006 Software Architects Forum in Istanbul. In this series, we present a full day tutorial about software factories and domain specific languages in 10 or 11 cities in Europe, Middle East and South Africa.

Looking at the City

As always, Istanbul was great. The Microsoft hosts (thanks Gurkan and team!) made us feel really welcome and I personally absolutely enjoyed Istanbul again. (Too bad that I only ever manage to fly into this city for only a day or two ... I really want to come back for a longer stay at some time in the future.) The event was quite big with 170-200 attendees and the translators were really impressive: during the Q&A they flawlessly translated questions from Turkish to English. I think that this is quite an accomplishment as they were not able to prepare for the questions upfront. (For the main tutorial, they have received our slides in advance.) I really liked the idea of the longer Q&A session at the end and Beat and I decided to make it a part of all upcoming events.

Dinner with Microsoft Turkey & EMEA before the event.
(Yes, I really need to scan the photo of Beat and myself with the belly dancer ... ;-))

After returning back from Istanbul on Saturday, I continued on to Munich (after picking up Katja in Austria) to check out a house we want to move into. As I'm in Madrid right now, this makes four major cities in four countries in four days. Ouch.

Anyway ... off to meet Beat in a few minutes to make some final adjustments for tomorrow's event here in Spain. I'm looking forward.

Comments

[Mert Sakarya]

Hey, Ingo, we also enjoyed your stay in Istanbul. Arvindra, you and Beat have enlightened us. You've already given me good vision of what's going to happen in the future. I hope that works. But it's a long road. Hope to see you (and other guys) again here in Istanbul soon. Plus make longer QA sessions.