A fortnight ago I’ve had a privilege, a luxury, and a duty (trying to pass for a real developer) to attend CRMUG Focus and Microsoft Build 2017, all within a space of 5 days.

The best quote of the entire week came from one of the presenters who had about 4 or 5 Surface devices utilized during the demo:

We only scratched the Surface today

Turns out, that reflected quite well my feeling about the entire week. Almost two weeks later, and I’m still digesting the content; but over the next few days I hope to distill what I’ve heard, seen, and felt into small and easy to consume bites.

Before we start, let’s talk about why Build is so important, for example, what’s the difference between Build and Ignite, both being developer-friendly conferences? David “Xrm.Tools” Yack answered it best:

Ignite is about what’s now, Build is about what’s coming

With that in mind, a lot of things I’m going to talk and speculate about will be about tomorrow, and how technologies are going to change Dynamics 365 as we know it.

First of all, regardless of what’s coming, we all will need new skills, new tools, and new approaches to our tasks. No longer 1:N data modelling is going to save our butts when building a solution for our customer.

At CRMUG Focus, Scott “All your BI are belong to us” Sewell vividly demonstrated that my chances of floating and staying alive are much fairer as a lady with a feather-duster than a dude with a piano. But that piqued my interest. What if I was a bloke wielding that mop? Well, turns out, for my age group chances are the same, whether I’m holding a Windex or a trombone – absolute zilch.

Looks like I’ve been fooled into the wrong occupation under some false pretenses and a classic gaming of correlation vs causation. But no more, Scott, no more! I decided that, if I want to learn to interpert the data, make sense out of petabytes collected by IoT thingabobs from all over the place, and not to be ridiculed by Scott ever again, then I better start learning.

And what would be a better place to learn some data magic than Microsoft Professional Program for Data Science. Come July, August, or September – you know where to find and hopefully join me. What do I want to get out of it besides getting an upper hand in the data battles? Being able one day to create something as beautiful as A Day in the Life of Americans. How about you?