I’m back from Seattle

Ok, so it’s been a week since I’ve been back, but with all the school catching up I needed to do, I only now got time to write this. If I could only use one word to describe my trip, I’d use the word awesome.

After a long flight, with a one night delay in New York, I finally arrived at the Seattle-Tacoma airport.

After a short ride on the bus I was downtown Seattle, and really excited about what I saw. I walked around the city and went sightseeing for the rest of the day, where I saw the Space Needle, the Pike Place market, the original Starbucks, and other places.

Monday morning, I went to the Washington State Convention and Trade Center, registered for the summit, and then quickly went to check-in at the Renaissance Hotel. Back from the hotel, we were served lunch, and then Toby Richards, Colleen Hunter-Gale and Sean O’Driscoll gave us a few words. After these talks, we got a chance to meet up with our regional MVPs and our MVP leads during a reception and (a very tasty) dinner. Here I got to meet my MVP Lead, Petru Juchovschi, and other Romanian MVPs.

After desert, I went over to the U.S. area, and sat down with my fellow XNA/DirectX MVPs and had a great time. I finally got to see Nick, George, Andy and Michael in person, together with a few other DirectX MVPs, and their MVP Lead, Eric Sassaman.

When the night was done, I went back to my hotel room, and slept until morning.

Tuesday morning we started off towards the Microsoft campus. I must say I was very excited to see it, and really liked how the campus looked.

I looked around a little at the Microsoft Conference Center and then took a bus to Building 85, which is a sort of a cooler version of Area 51. Some people can go in, extremely interesting things go on inside there, but you can’t talk about them once outside. This is where we met Dave Weller and the XNA team, and here we had some awesome discussions. In the evening, we went to Jillian’s with the XNA team and had fun talking to them over a drink.

Wednesday we had even more discussions, which were followed in the evening by the Attendee Party at the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum. After a walk through the museums, I met up with the other XNA MVPs. We got to eat, drink, talk,  listen to people doing karaoke with a live band, and then finally watch, boo and cheer Jim and Ziggy as they showed they expertise in the skills of Rock Band.

The last day, Thursday, we got keynotes from Ray Ozzie, the Chief Software Architect of Microsoft and Steve Ballmer, Chief Executive Officer.

After the closing remarks by Toby, we (the XNA MVPs) got together for a last lunch.

For the rest of the day, I went to do some final shopping and visit the Underground Tour of Seattle. Early Friday morning, I got on the plane and started my journey back home, impatiently waiting to get back to my beloved Lidia.

Overall, I am very satisfied with the summit. I met some great people there, and got to learn and do some very interesting stuff. The XNA Team members are really awesome people, I was impressed about how they talked with us, how openly they discussed, and how interested they were in out feedback. I’ll take this opportunity to thank them again for their great work. The other MVPs are also a cool bunch of people, and I can’t wait to see them again… maybe next year.