Microsoft Ignite is just around the corner and I am excited to be a part of the event once again. I have been honored to be a speaker for the past 5 years after being on staff for the first one. This year is obviously going to look very different from those previous 6 events, but this virtual event will still be rife with valuable information and great connection opportunities.

This year the “shiny new stuff” technical sessions that I have always been involved in are all being done by Microsoft Employees which lead to the big question “What is left for community members to do?”. Anna Chu & the community team had out backs, as always, giving us an opportunity to submit and be selected to deliver sessions that we felt were valuable to the community in this time.

One of the areas that I have been focused on helping people with over the past 6 months has been how to get a sense of normalcy in this isolated world.

My dudes & I ran a web series bringing people from around the globe together to hear about cool places from awesome speakers who were willing to share their time & their passion for their special places. You can find some of the stories on the Story Telling About Cool Places YouTube channel. I still need to get the rest of the videos uploaded there. #slacker

I spent dozens of hours working with teachers who needed help coming up with how they were going to teach kids in a remote world when they didn’t even know how to get started thinking about it.

I also have had dozens of conversations with community friends about my current home office configuration which I continue to tweak, tune, and evolve. My goal is to ensure that I provide myself with a comfortable working environment but to also make my working world low impact on my family while enabling my work to be uninterrupted when required. It is a delicate balance but we have made it work very well.

I am very fortunate in that I have been working in a remote fashion for some period of time since 2005 (yes, I had to go to LinkedIn to remind myself of how long I’ve been doing this for). My “work-from-home” setup has changed dramatically over the years and evolved multiple times as I went from work-from-home to work-from-anywhere and back to work-from-home.

The evolution also happened multiple times because of the changes that have happened in my life over the past 15 years. I went from a single guy in a bachelor house, to a married guy, to a married guy with little kids, and now a married guy with tween-aged kids. Each evolution came with different settings, scenarios I needed to account for, and levels of interaction with others.

This is the first in a series of posts that I will be doing between now and Microsoft Ignite which is happening September 22-24, 2020 online and COMPLETELY FREE. This means that you should be going to the https://ignite.microsoft.com site and registering for the event as soon as you finish reading this, if you haven’t already done it.

I am helping moderate a 30 minute table talk called “Working from home – How are other people doing it?” in the Americas time block with Iasia Brown, Loni French, Matthew Hudson, and Matt Wade on Wednesday September 23rd from 3:45p-4:15p. I am excited to hear what my co-moderators have to say, as well as all the folks from around the community. This blog post series is my way of putting some of my personal tips and tricks from my latest evolution down in a way that I can easily refer people to without monopolizing the live conversation.

Immediately after the table talk I will be going live with Adam Saxton & Patrick Leblanc from Guy in a Cube and John White, my co-host of the BIFocal Podcast, on the Guy in a Cube YouTube channel to discuss all of the Power BI announcements that have happened at Microsoft Ignite. You can find us here: https://guyinacu.be/ignite2020

I hope that you find this series useful. I will share links to all of the gear, however I am not using affiliate links because I am not looking to profit on my recommendations. There is nothing wrong with doing this, but I prefer to share via Amazon Smile links, which I sincerely hope you all will use to benefit your own favorite organizations. If you haven’t set up your Amazon Profile with smile.amazon.com please consider doing so and help your favorite non-profit organization when you buy stuff on Amazon.

That’s all for today. I am excited to write this series and would love to hear what you think about each part in the comments below, on Twitter, or via email.