As I write this, I’;m on my way home after attending my first Interop event. The purpose of this post is to detail my experience at Interop ITX 2017 as a first time attendee. Interop Community Interop was designed around the conference, not vendors. This provides a different dynamic to many other conferences, which are at times a week long sales pitch. Instead, the focus is on the attendees and content making it more enjoyable as an engineer.

Over the past few years, Eric Wright has been organising running events called #vfit for conference attendees. The runs are 5 KM in length and suitable for all fitness levels, from sprinters to walkers. Interop ITX 2017 was the first event to put #vfit on the agenda, and it was big. I’;m not going to count the number of people in the picture below, but I estimate attendance to be roughly 1 million.