I'm home. Glad to be home, if I'm honest, but TechCon 365 Dallas was amazing and I'm still a bit buzzing from it.
It was my first TechCon and my first time speaking in the US, so I got the First Timer ribbon on day one. Then I found the rest of the ribbons and got a bit carried away. For the record, I picked every single one of those myself.
The conference was at the Irving Convention Center at Las Colinas, just outside Dallas, and I had two sessions, both in Room C.
Thursday: Dashboard in a Day? Nah. Let's do one in 70 minutes!
First up, 9am Thursday. This is the live build talk: the Superstore sample data, a brief from a made-up distribution company that wants one page for its leadership team, and 70 minutes to get from raw data to something you'd actually put in front of them. Ingest, model, measures, time intelligence, then make it look decent.
And, like in Budapest, I wasn't the only one building.
I finished in time, which is always the first win with a live demo. Claude did a good job as well, to be fair to it. But it still adds tiny text everywhere, and it still doesn't think aesthetically. It gets the numbers right and then makes them hard to read. I wrote about exactly that after Budapest, and two months later it's the same story.
Friday: Design Before DAX
Friday was the one for me. Honestly, this talk was so much better.
It's about designing the report before you write a single measure: how people's eyes actually read a page, spending colour like a budget, and wireframing the questions before you pick a single visual. The 3-30-300 rule does a lot of the heavy lifting.
Then I take a report that's doing everything wrong and run it through five passes on the same data.
But the best bit was the questions. There were so many of them. I got to talk about how little I use filters, why less is more, and give some real, honest advice on people's actual reports rather than the tidy version. I loved it.
The room was all sorts too, from students to government employees and everything in between.
The people
The thing I'll remember most is how kind and welcoming the American community is. I loved every second of it.
I spent a lot of the week with Lindsay Shelton and Angela Jones, which was amazing.
It was also great to hang out with Diego Domingos da Silva. I wasn't expecting to fly to Texas and bond with someone over Final Fantasy X, but that's a huge highlight of the whole trip.
Bits and pieces
I came home with a leather speaker luggage tag, a handful of patches and, obviously, all of those ribbons.
Thank you to the TechCon 365 team for having me, and to everyone who came to either session, especially if you asked a question on Friday.
Glad to be home. But what an experience.