Shane O’Neill’s American Adventure
Last month I Embarked on an epic American adventure across the vast landscapes of the USA, I found myself swept up in a whirlwind of excitement. This adventure spanned 8 exhilarating days, involved 6 airborne escapades, 4 diverse states, and immersed me in 2 unique events. Each end of this adventure, as distinct as night and day, proved to be a treasure trove of experiences, lots of learning, and making every moment of travel an investment in unforgettable memories.
The first stage of my American adventure saw me travel to Arizona to attend the EUC Unplugged (formerly known as the EUC Master Retreat) that is run by Steve Greenberg. If you don’t know who Steve is, let me just say that he is a legend in the EUC space and one of the most genuine, finest people that you could ever meet. This was an event that I had wanted to attend for many years, so I was very excited to finally get the opportunity.
Right off the bat during the opening keynote, I knew that this was something different. The focus was on the participant, finding the right event journey for you that would get you the most benefit. We were off to a flying start. What came next was something that I hadn’t experienced before. All the attendees sat in a large circle and if you wanted to pitch a session, you stood up and described to the group. It was then posted on the wall. We all received a strip of stickers with 9 gold stars on it and afterwards, you went to the wall and placed a star on the sessions that interested you the most. This set the agenda for the next two days. It was truly a conference that crowd sourced the content.
With the agenda set, it was time for dinner and each of the vendor sponsors had different options available to sign up for. I joined Login VSI for some good pizza and to hear Ron Oglesby take us through how to build a “bug out” bag. What is that you ask? It’s a bag that you have ready in your car should you find yourself in a situation where you need to make your way home and may need to survive for a day or two. The bag contains water, food, and medical supplies among other things. One item that really caught my eye was an encrypted hard drive that has all your important documents. Living in Ireland where we don’t have natural disasters often, it really did get me thinking about how this would make sense when you live somewhere that may be prone to flooding or tornadoes.
There are too many sessions to list them all but some of the highlights for me were:
- Measuring DEX in a scientific manner
- PowerShell coding standards
- Intel vGPU
- New Teams
- The future of application packaging
- Surviving Citrix Cloud outages
There was something for everyone. And, it was not just the session, there was also some great fun activities. We got to practice with a Japanese trained sword master, build a retro gaming console with Remko Weijnen, and my favourite of all, got to go off roading in the desert. It was an amazing event, and I would highly recommend it.
American Adventure continued in Florida
The next stage of my American adventure saw me take a red-eye to Fort Lauderdaleto attend the annual Citrix Technology Professional meeting via Chicago. In hindsight, this was not a good idea, but I still managed to make it in one piece.
This was a 3-day event where we got direct access to the Citrix product managers and leadership to review the technology roadmaps, understand where Citrix are going, discuss and provide feedback around all the recent changes within Citrix, and suggest where improvements can be made.
While the content is under NDA and can’t be shared, I can safely say that Citrix have doubled down on making the products even more feature rich with some great enhancements already delivered over the last 12 months and even more coming over the next year. The investment in product development is really starting to show.
It was a whirlwind adventure but worth it, getting to see so many old friends from around the world, too many to mention, but also making lots of new ones. Already looking forward to next year…
Shane O’Neill is a Citrix CTP/ EUC Architect here at Enterprise Solutions. He loves automation. Shane is constantly coding in C# and PowerShell to create new tools to make his life and that of other Citrix admins easier, and to fill in the gaps in automation and reporting that Citrix doesn’t currently provide. Holding certifications in Citrix, VMware, Cato Networks, Microsoft and Hyper-V to name just a few. Shane was named one of the first Citrix Technology Advocates in 2016 and has held the title of Citrix Technology Professional since 2019, one of only 60 worldwide.
