TR16 Journal (Day T-4) - pre-TR16 | microSummit | ALM Summit

Article
02/01/2013

This week we had the rare event of two events coinciding, allowing us the opportunity to bring together a subset of the ALM Rangers and finally being able to map names, avatars and virtual characters.

ALM Summit

The ALM Summit is a public event that allows you to gain a deeper insight into your application lifecycle, discuss industry best practices that the unique opportunity to interact directly with the Visual Studio team, top engineers from other Microsoft product groups, and industry luminaries. See https://www.alm-summit.com for more information.

pre-TR16 event

TechReady (https://www.facebook.com/TechReady) is an internal technical conference for Microsoft employees. Before and after TechReady, the product groups host pre- and post-TR workshops … one of which Robert Bernstein (arrrrrrrrrrr…) and I attended this week.

The photos show two Ranger posters for TechReady (left) and an exercise from the training (right). Notice Robert Bernstein’s neat handwriting Smile

microSummit

The mSummit was the first of its kind and made possible by the ALM Summit and the pre-TR event overlapping. Primary objective was a get-together to enjoy some pizza, to meet face to face at long last and to have a few candid discussions.

Expressed in set theory (AFAIK) we get:

A È B = { r : r Î A or r Î B }

where

A –> ALM Rangers Ç ALM Summit = { x : x Î ALM Rangers and x Î ALM Summit attendees }
B –> ALM Rangers Ç pre-TR summit = { x : x Î ALM Rangers and x Î pre-TR summit }

The mSummit was scheduled from 6-8, however, we switched off the lights at 00:13 in the morning. Topics included the www.almmag.com, the concept of migration and synchronization of ALM systems, the use of the TFS Integration Tools and finally a discussion to try and comprehend why the ALM Rangers are as passionate and committed as they are.

One of the ALM Rangers queried the number of ALM Rangers and categorisation, which resulted in me gathering the following “rough” stats.

	MSFT full-time employed ALM Rangers versus non-MSFT ALM Rangers.
	Active, Associate and Honorary Rangers, as listed in https://aka.ms/vsarindex.
	Rangers and Distinguished Rangers.
	Rangers who are not and those that are MVPs.