A TechU Reminder

Edit: Some links no longer work

Originally posted July 9, 2019 on AIXchange

I’ve written about the IBM Systems Technical University (TechU) conferences many times, most recently following the event in Atlanta in May. As most of our audience is in the United States, I’ll note the fall conference is in October in Las Vegas, but TechU events are scheduled worldwide, so keep this on your radar.

One thing I appreciate about TechU is that they get the little things right. For instance, you can download slides from any session once you get home. Of course presenters typically include their contact info on their presentations, and I’ve found most are willing to respond to follow-up queries. 

For an idea of what went on at the Atlanta conference I attended, see this. Or check out this Twitter graph that analyzed tweets with the #IBMTechU hastag:

The graph represents a network of 493 Twitter users whose recent tweets contained “#IBMTechU”, or who were replied to or mentioned in those tweets, taken from a data set limited to a maximum of 18,000 tweets. The network was obtained from Twitter on Wednesday, 08 May 2019 at 17:12 UTC.

The tweets in the network were tweeted over the 9-day, 1-hour, 44-minute period from Monday, 29 April 2019 at 14:18 UTC to Wednesday, 08 May 2019 at 16:03 UTC.

Additional tweets that were mentioned in this data set were also collected from prior time periods. These tweets may expand the complete time period of the data.

This provides a handy list of people to follow during the conference. I like knowing which sessions are well attended and what conference-goers are interested in, and I join in those conversations. Even if I wasn’t there, I’d still like to know what I’m missing out on. 

Believe me, TechU is worth your time and effort.