How to put on a PDC viewing party

The PDC is next week, and it is going to be huge. The amount and scale of the announcements are, in my view, the biggest of any PDC in the past (can’t say for future PDCs).

Two of the keynotes by Ray Ozzie will be streamed live. The other keynotes will be available online shortly after they are completed. Since the PDC is on the west coast, this puts the keynotes during lunchtime in the EST time zone.

The keynotes will contain all of the big announcements, and the great demos. They will give you an idea for the flavor of what the sessions are going to deep dive into.

So here is how to throw a PDC viewing party.

0. Reserve a conference room of some sort. You will need a projector, speakers, and a computer to stream from. The speakers are optional, if everyone in your part can read lips.

1. Invite everyone you know. Invite people you don’t know. Tweet about it. Try not to break any stalking laws though.

2. Either convince your boss to pay for pizza for everyone, or tell the attendees to bring their own lunch. Giant bowls of popcorn sound good right now too. You could just steal food from the office kitchen refrigerator, but you never know how old that food is. Pitch this to the boss as a training event, and a heads up on the new technologies MS is releasing. It is important that you can work our plans for the next few years into your own plans.

3. Settle in, and watch. Keep the wow-ing and ahh-ing down. You don’t want to make your officemates jealous that you are a developer, and they are stuck with some ‘other’ career.

4. Don’t forget to poop like an elephant, and think like an architect. After the shock and awe feeling wears off, and your vision returns, start to talk about the tech, and how you could use it to make your jobs better. How you could use it to increase your value to your customers. Perhaps that new thing will allow you to roll out more features faster, or connect with the customer in a new way. Share what you learn with the gophers who don’t show up to your party.

5. Start a buzzword bingo game, and give out prizes. Words to track would be ‘super’, ‘excited’, ‘cloud’, ‘plus’, and ‘whack-a-doo-whack-a-doo’, ‘mac’, ‘apple’, ‘virtual’, and ‘mobile.’

If you can’t get your own party together, you either need to just huddle in your cube, and pretend you are working on code, or traipse on over to someone else’s viewing party.

When you are done, and want to talk about any of the topics in detail, please let me know. We can schedule a visit.

If you know of a public viewing party, let me know, and I will list it here, or post it as a comment.

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