Every year (of course, not during the pandemic years), Morgan Stanley does a Technology Expo, with a growing number of presentations, booths and locations. This is an amazing event, with thousands of participants, hundreds of booths, more than a dozen locations, clearly one of a kind. And – 2022 wasn’t in anyway different; and so, the submission period began. I submitted multiple booth proposals, multiple tech talk proposals, etc., and then waited for the results for weeks 🙂

When the results were announced, I got flabbergasted – first learned the number of booths I got: 6 different booths! Topics were: 2 locations to talk about the Metaverse, 1 location to talk about a technology called DOM Projection that we plan to open source in the near future, 1 location to talk about our use of WebView2 (see https://youtu.be/8y3ZCzw3LtA on public details about that), 1 location to talk about our new usage statistics methods, and one location to talk about our use of server side middleware and our original, 10+ year old solution for the service mesh. And I thought that’s it, when the news came out, that there is a 7th, special booth to be taken over too – this one very different, one of the 5 special booths to be visited by the Morgan Stanley board! And the topic – a new way to experience Art, via virtual reality! The firm’s global headquarters, 1585 Broadway was the location for the latter. The large and expansive lobby and cafeteria got converted into the marquee showrooms for the day – a tall and stately white squarely structure set in the heart of the lobby, could be hardly missed. The structure itself was open on all sides, inviting everyone to a showcase of the special selected projects. The projects themselves were a preview into the Morgan Stanley technology story, told through the lens of solutions designed for our firm, our clients, our people and our future. And it was the center of the booth, a Metaverse experience introducing the attendees to a virtual reality tour of our Art collection, that was served by me and the team, that was the great introduction to the New York event and a perfect teaser into the central hub of the technology expo.

But the list of surprises was far from finished. As I was eagerly preparing for all the different booths and topics, it dawned on me that I haven’t yet checked the tech talks – and yes, I got a tech talk too! It took me 2 more days to figure out that I got not one tech talk, rather 3 out of the 15 showed 😀 Namely:

• Welcome to the Metaverse! – my talk about explaining the last 6 years’ projects and achievements in the Metaverse space
• ServiceMesh is the New Thing! Or is it? – my talk explaining how the ServiceMesh concept has been around for over a decade although we never named it as such
• Where does desktop development go and why should I be interested? – my talk explaining the new concepts of desktop development, why there is still a value in WPF Core, and how does hybrid applications demonstrate the best of both worlds (it’s in the name 😀 )

Sadly, I cannot really share more than this, the title and the short description of my booths and tech talks for now; and this picture from the company’s LinkedIn page: