Wednesday May 7th 2025 - Work trip to DC and fun trip to Toronto - Day 2, DC conference - urban walks

I was ready to go in the morning, recharged after a fun but long day Tuesday.  We went to the same bagel shop as the day before and my manager tried the New Jersey staple of the Pork Roll sandwich and I had the same for the 2nd day in a row.  It’s rare to fine pork roll at all outside the NYC metro area and even rarer to find some place that gets all the details right with salt, pepper and ketchup.  Pearl’s is a very cute bagel place and they even have nice outdoor seating like a little bistro or something.  Very unusual for a small shop.

As soon as we went up the escalator into the main hall, it was apparent that this was not as modest a gathering as I might have imagined.  There seemed to be a ton of people milling around.  We attended one early break-out session before the keynote session started.  The keynote probably serves mentally, though not officially, as the start of the conference.  That first break-out was ok but I didn’t really get much from it and I wondered if it was going to be a long bland day.  When we made our way deeper into the 2.3 million square foot Walter E Washington convention center and converged with an ocean of people from many other break-out sessions that had just ended, I started realizing the scale of both the facility and the attendance.  At one point we went up an escalator which was quite long and there were 2 going up side by side.  It was a totally solid wall of people riding up, more dense than even a busy subway station escalator usually gets because nobody was power walking up one side.  The keynote was in an enormous hall with no windows that easily held the 5000 something people, albeit with very narrow seats.  Thankfully the amount of space between the rows was a little more generous so it wasn’t hard to find a place to set a backpack near your feet or whatever.  

The keynote was very well presented with a series of people joining the main speaker to discuss how their Nutanix journey had been or announce some new partnership etc.  Most were live and in-person but even the video entries were really smoothly transitioned in and out of and engaging.  Most of the announcements of new features and partnerships didn’t really excite me because they don’t match up with the relatively basic set of features we use in Nutanix but at least it was all presented well enough that it wasn’t a bore to sit through.  

The end of the keynote was the highlight for me because tech talk ended and the celebrity guest was brought out for a chat.  Chef José Andrés is a familiar face and name for many diners and people like Brian and I who watch a fair amount of cooking shows on TV but I’d never heard him say more than a few tightly edited quips about a contestants plate of food or whatever.  Learning the depth of his humanitarian work, focused on feeding people in places that are in crisis, was very interesting and great. But he was there to plant a message with us.  In between funny on-the-nose self-promotions about his latest book, TV show and restaurants were a few deep bits of wisdom.  One was that while it’s great and sometimes valuable to get together with like minds to collaborate and learn, like our conference, there is also value in taking yourself out of your comfort zone and intentionally throwing yourself into something very unfamiliar for perspective and maybe inspiration.  Another was his passion to have a bias for action.  Basically he said that once you are in motion (figuratively) it’s easier to charge ahead, course correct or even turn around if you have to than if you are still sitting around trying to figure it all out before you begin.  This rings very true to me in work and in life.  

The other message I loved was that he we should realize the value that many different people, from all different walks of life and social strata, bring their own value with them to make our world what it is.  It was kind of in the vein of ‘you didn’t built that’ from Barack Obama in 2012.  If you only remember ‘You didn’t built that’ as some sort of socialist anti-capitalist rant, the link I put for it is a good start at seeing that often mocked phrase in a more complete and thoughtful context.

After the keynote was lunch. The convention center has dozens of people that just line the hallways and repeatedly urge the crown to turn this way for lunch and that there is a second set of places to eat in this other hall etc.  Getting out of the big keynote hall was a little slow but as soon as we got out of the little pinch point the rest of the walk through to the ballrooms for lunch was not overly crowded and not at all slow.  It took just a few moments in line for us to grab our paper plates and dish up salad, sandwiches and cookies in a buffet line.  Drinks were self-service at a different station and then we sat communally at large round tables to eat.  The food was very straight forward (only 1 salad dressing choice and 3 sandwich choices) but very efficiently setup and reasonably tasty.

The afternoon break-outs were much more engaging for us and it has triggered a whole series of action items I want to take on when we get back.  By the time we got to the last one that started at 4, my energy level was waning.  This was the one I was most interested in though because it went deep into a lot of fundamentals of how this stuff works.  Most of the other sessions are high level pep talks about what you can do or how somebody else approached their giant project successfully or whatever.  This was about the history of how the product got where it is now and a lot of the engineering decisions that led it to this place as well as diagrams and explanations of the flow of data etc.

The conference day ended, I wasn’t inclined to try to join the same group from the day before for another long noisy group dinner.  My manager wanted a jog and I wanted a walk. So we did our own thing for 2 hours and I did have an enjoyable stroll down to Pennsylvania Ave and walked by the Herbert Hoover FBI building, the Canadian Embassy and a few other large interesting government facilities.  I had dinner outside on the corner of Pennsylvania and 11th streets.  The spaghetti Bolognese and glass of wine were perfectly enjoyable and the people watching on the street was enjoyable other than the frequent horn honking.  I didn’t realize it until I was writing this blog post but I was across the street from one of Chef Andrés locations at that time.

I wandered up the flights of stairs that connect the different levels of John Marshall Park (which was totally deserted) and ended up in the DC courts area and the US appeals court buildings that make up Judiciary Square.  At that point I felt like I’d accomplished my evening walk and boarded Metro for a quick 2 stop run back to Metro Center.  Meanwhile, my manager had not eaten yet so I joined him on his dinner adventure to a lovely steak restaurant near our hotel.  It was nice sitting outside again and having another glass of wine while we exchanged ideas about how to take the information and inspiration from the conference back with us to our normal lives.

The last event of the evening was an invite to a rooftop party.  I didn't have any burning need to go but, unlike Wednesday, our start was later Thursday so staying up a little later didn't seem unreasonable.  We walked from the steak place down to this bar neither of us knew anything about.  Turns out it's a hotel which is immediately adjacent to the Treasury building which itself is riht next to the White House.  This means that from the rooftop you have a really interesting relatively unobscured view at the White House, Washington monument and a ton of other iconic DC buildings.  It was late at night and it all had such a peaceful tranquil appearance.  We've also been so lucky with the weather this trip.  DC isn't someplace known for having an abundance of mild pleasant evenings in spring and summer but thats just what we've been getting so far.  One funny detail is that we never did figure out who the host was for this party and we didn't end up meeting up with a single other conference attendee at it.  We did talk to 2 very lively random people and we each enjoyed our single 35 dollar cocktail (!).  Still, seeing all those views with the great lighting was very heady and memorable.