What’s it like to organize an event at Microsoft Campus
Microsoft is one of the largest tech companies in the world. It has always been a dream destination for developers across the world. Be it the cutting edge technologies, global vision for a better future or remarkable leadership, Microsoft jives along the lines.
Being a Microsoft Student Partner provides bountiful opportunities, learning experiences, community networking, and profile building in every possible way. The Student partner team dedicates long hours to the program and keeps providing us with everything needed. If not for them, this event would have never been pulled off.
The buildup
In October 2019, Skillenza in partnership with Microsoft organized a developers only 12-hour hackathon, Hacknight 3.0, at Microsoft Campus, Hyderabad. I along with two other MSP friends enrolled and competed against developers from various tech companies. Even though we didn't win, we put up a very formidable display and gained a lot of appreciation from many employees and experts. I have covered our project and other details from the Hacknight in my blog titled ‘ Hacknight 3.0 — More than just a hackathon’. However, I would definitely like to mention Mohit here.
Mohit Verma works at Microsoft as a Software Engineer. He has hands on experience on .NET design and architecture and .NET, Azure tools and practice. He’s an amazing mentor and speaker. From our first meeting at the Hacknight, he’s always motivated me as an MSP and offered help in anyway he could and that’s where it all started.
At this point of time, there were 3 MSPs at my college myself, Mohammad Azhar Ali and Mohammed Umar. We did a lot of program-related activities at our campus in the form of workshops, competitions, seminars etc through our student body. I lead the technical chapter as the President and have a working team of 30 members. The idea to be able to organize an event at Microsoft as a student body was very exciting to each and every one of us. Being the most experienced and one of the first MSPs on campus, I took the lead into this event.
In one of the community calls in October 2019, Pablo Veramendi, MSP Global program manager, introduced us to the details of MSP program i.e the program managers, advancements, milestones, benefits, do’s and don’ts etc. One slide really caught my attention, the Hack with Azure Workshops. These are workshop resources designed by MCAs in a very easy to use manner for anyone willing to dive into Azure services, specially ML and AI. With majority in our college being less aware about the Azure platform and enthusiastic about ML, we decided to conduct a workshop joining the two ends using the Mood detector material from aka.ms/hackwithazure.
The big challenge
With the event decided, we now moved on to planning the marketing and logistics. We were very sure to leave a shockwave in our college with the announcement of us conducting a workshop at Microsoft Hyderabad Campus as only a handful from the entire college had been to Microsoft Hyderabad before. On the other hand, Mohit worked on booking us an MPR( Multi-Purpose Room, a kind of seminar hall) at Microsoft for the workshop. We planned to keep the workshop open for around 120 people.
By this time, the news broke out. The prospect of being able to attend a workshop at Microsoft Hyderabad was starting to frame up in everyone’s mind. However, with over 3500 students in our college, only a few could make it. Shortly, Mohit confirmed the final details. The B1 MPR was booked for us on 1st February 2020 from 9 am to 5 pm for a total of 200 attendees! What only seemed a dream was now shaping into reality.
The next challenge for us as the organizers was to prepare a list of attendees. The question was who all to include? We had our friends, batchmates, juniors, seniors everyone interested. We decided to only limit entry to 3rd and 4th-year students from CSE, ECE and IT. But that would be an injustice to passionate students from other excluded branches and lower years. We then planned to make it open for everyone to apply and book a spot on first come basis. Again that would have been a major issue. By the time our announcement would have reached everyone in the college, registrations would have been full.
After a brief discussion with the faculty, we decided to onboard really enthusiastic students by having them earn a spot for themselves. In order to board the workshop, they would have to make a 30 sec video on ‘How Microsoft inspires them’ and mail it to us. We would then review all video applications and mail a confirmation to the selected candidates. In a similar way to the MSP program application requirement, we solved one of the biggest challenges we faced very smoothly.
In no time, our mailbox was flooded with videos. We had members from the marketing team working on the video applications and onboarding participants.
Creating the best learning experience
In order to generate the best learning curve for every attendee to the workshop, we decided to work on the structure of the workshop, speakers, transportation and prerequisites.
Workshop structure
The workshop has to start at 9 am by the earliest and conclude before 5 pm. Keeping a small buffer for ourselves, just in case, we scheduled the workshop from 10 am to 4 pm. The workshop would consist of 2 sessions, Session 1 and 2. Session 1 would consist of the introduction to the workshop, welcoming the speaker(s) and commencement of the project. This would be followed by a lunch break from 1 pm to 1.45 pm. Session 2 would completely comprise the hands-on session followed by a vote of thanks and dispersal.
To our surprise, the college staff and management were already talking about our efforts and the groundbreaking event we are planning at Microsoft. We had already planned and invited over a few faculty members, our HOD, Dean and the Director to join us for the workshop.
We were at this point in the middle of January.
Getting the Speaker(s)
Before a very enthusiastic yet a beginner level crowd to Azure Platform, we did consider ourselves being the speaker(s). However, it didn’t seem exciting for our batchmates who were already used to hearing our tech talks. So we decided to not fill up as speakers and remain organizers. I consulted Mohit in this regard and he seemed to have many friends at Microsoft who would take up this role, he being occupied in a project deadline. After a day, he shared with me the details of Amit Tripathi, a software engineer at Microsoft for 6 years. He was someone who very perfectly fitted in the role that had to be played by our speaker.
Through all this, I was having in my mind a desire to invite someone with loads and loads of experience in technology to address us at Microsoft. This was the moment when I was struck of Mr. Ritesh Modi, the one who honored the Hacknight 3.0 winners at the presentation.
Ritesh Modi is an ex Microsoft Senior Technology Evangelist. He has worked on Ethereum and Solidity, extensively helping and advising companies. He is a regular speaker on blockchain and Solidity at conferences and local meetups. He is an architect, evangelist, speaker, and a known leader for his contributions toward blockchain, data centers, Azure Bots, cognitive services, DevOps, Artificial Intelligence, and automation. He is the author of five books and some of his notable books include “Azure for Architects’, “Solidity Programming Essentials” and “DevOps with Windows Server 2016”. He holds more than 25 certifications and is a known face in the industry.
I reached out to him and invited him to the workshop in the capacity of the chief guest. He highly appreciated us and readily agreed. The icing on the cake !
Transportation problem
Around, 95% of all the attendees to the workshop were college students. While few of them were comfortable traveling by themselves all the way to Microsoft campus located approx 15 km from our college campus, many were reluctant to. It was very important for us to have everyone synchronized throughout the day. We looked to resolve this by arranging transportation alternatives for everyone. Soon we kept that idea off the table as it was too laborious. While we looked for arranging transportation for everyone, it seemed to be a pretty expensive solution. But certainly, hard work yields results.
Looking at the tenacity of our efforts, our HOD asked us to write an application to the Director requesting for the transportation. We were elated at the advent of our problem being addressed by the college and in no time drafted an application. Our Director, Dr. Basheer Ahmed, really motivate us and approved our request. We now had 3 buses at our disposal for a round trip between Microsoft and our college for all our attendees :)
Working the prerequisites
For an audience new to Azure platform, a direct seat in the workshop would have a majority taken up by surprise and unable to match with the pace of the session. In order to combat this, I suggested a workshop on ‘Microsoft Azure Platform’ to be made mandatory for all the workshop attendees just before the Microsoft trip. This would be a separate event plus would get everyone familiar with Azure. I administered this session on 31st January 2020. It was one of the best workshops I have taken. Further details can be found in my blog titled ‘A session on Microsoft Azure ’.
With the audience ready, we now have the only last hurdle, getting Azure passes for everyone. In this regard, I contacted Angela Carlson, CPM via MSP help. She walked me through the guidelines for using the passes after collecting some essential details. In a couple of days, I received a voucher of 200 Azure for students passes worth $100 of credits each.Our detailed planning and structured approach made it very easy for us to get the passes.
With everything set, the stage is now all set for the day of event.
The big day
Right after my session on Azure, I alongside 4 of the team members left for Microsoft to give a check on the arrangements. Mohit was waiting for us with the logistics team. We were escorted to the hall after a thorough security check. Mohit introduced us to the logistics manager who gave us a demonstration of the AV equipment, automated light systems, supplies and the seating plan.
The hall was a luxury. We had never before seen such a sumptuous seminar hall with every automation that one could imagine. The projectors and the microphones were all centralized and automated. Literally, any device was sufficient to operate the entire hall and just one volunteer to take care of everything from the lights to the AV. The thought of being at Microsoft as organizers really had a lot more weight than we imagined.
On the morning of 1st February, all the attendees gathered at the college, collected their azure passes and boarded the buses by 10 am. After a small delay, the buses departed the college at 10.30 am.
The buses reached Microsoft just after 11 am. Even though we were an hour off schedule, the excitement of the crowd never made us realize it. After the security clearances, everyone assembled in the MPR by 11.30 am. I was the curator for the event.
Mr. Modi arrived in the hall at 11.30 am sharp and the session started. We welcomed him and he gave his talk on his career and Microsoft. He talked to us of all that made him the man he is today. His talk was taken as an inspiration by many.
Next, we moved to a surprise. Inspired by our work at the college, many of our teammates gained particular interest in the MSP program. Eventually, some of them applied for the January cohort. To our joy, the results were out and we now had 9 MSP in our college! Not only did we benefit the community as a whole, but also entitled 6 of our mates to become MSP themselves.
The hands-on session commenced and everyone dived deep into the project. Amit made the audience dance to his tunes and very flawlessly administered the workshop. Soon, we broke for lunch and moved into the huge lounge full of restaurants in the dining area. Only now did we find ourselves time to discover the campus building. Everything was a piece of art as neat as a jigsaw puzzle. There were gyms, lawns, play areas, restaurants, outdoor sports and everything that could make up a living complex. It took a 5-minute ride in a shuttle to just move between two blocks. The scenery was picturesque and the campus, beautiful.
Everyone gathered back, the project completed and the workshop smoothly concluded. With my workshop the day before, everyone knew the technical challenges and could easily cruise to completion. By the end of the day, everyone had an amazing mood detector app built with custom vison API, flask framework in python hosted on azure cloud.
Conclusion and Learning outcomes
1) Attendees
Each and every attendee learned how to use custom vision API with web frameworks such as flask in python. More importantly, everyone learned the scalability, wide variety of services and readiness that azure brings to real-time projects. From being new to the cloud computing domain, everyone in the audience now had a project in hand and an azure for students subscription valid for an year to explore various other services.
Another important aspect highlighted here was the ability to follow documented instructions and execute them. Specially from portals such as aka.ms/hackwithazure.
2) For all the MSPs
The credibility of the MSP program was certainly the fulcrum of the entire event happening in the first place. It is what made us hustle and grab opportunities like these. With support from MSP-Help, organizing such events is an easier task. Various templates are available on Teams under MSP Help > Plan in-person engagements.
The program is not only about organizing but learning the ability to lead, make crucial decisions while excelling at technology. I personally feel that these were the instincts that led me taking up the Azure workshop right before the Microsoft trip. Further, with all this in motion, we were also able to motivate our fellow mates to enroll for the MSP program as well. This pretty much sums everything.
To conclude the blog, I would like to thank Mohit, Ritesh sir, Angela, our college management, my entire team, all the attendees and Azhar for making it happen. Here’s a few pictures from the workshop.
Thanks:)
