Our team is back from Microchip's MASTERs conference. It was four days filled with meetings, sightseeing, and travel.
The 21st annual MASTERs conference took place from August 16 until August 19. It is well known that this event is one of the best places for engineers and professionals to share technical information, new ideas and plans. That is precisely what the MikroE team did.
As you can see from the picture, it was a somewhat sun-filled trip. This year our CEO Neb, head of Hardware&Procurement Srdjan, and CBDO DJ (from left to right) flew to Phoenix, Arizona to participate in the conference.
Microchip's MASTERs conference 2017
The conference takes place at the very edge of the city. At the Marriott Desert Ridge, Arizona's largest luxury resort.
This year's theme was "Dream.Develop.Deliver". Engineers could choose between classes and workshops centering around Microchips product lines, or attend networking sessions with Microchip engineers.
In the images below you see Steve Sanghi, the Chairman, and CEO of Microchip Technology giving a keynote speech.
Over a year has passed since Microchip's acquisition of Atmel, and that change marked this MASTERs conference. You could see that everyone at Microchip was happy to talk about the great business results this acquisition brought.
The MASTERs is not an event an embedded engineer would want to miss. DJ told a story, how he met a rather enthusiastic group, who claimed that they have been on all 21 conferences so far.
Take a look at some of the images they made of the venue.
To no one's surprise, our click board™ range can be seen everywhere. Considering that Microchip had the 50 clicks in 50 days campaign this spring and that they continued to add click boards to their quick-start software libraries for MPLAB Code Configurator, the popularity of the range is only going to increase.
Cactuses, palm trees, and desert views
It turns out we couldn't have sent a better team - they don't suffer from jet lag, and they come back full of interesting stories.
How do the locals keep the plants alive and the lawn looking lush and green in the harsh desert conditions? Well, we don't know. And judging by the faces of our trio, neither do they.
From a Europen point of view, a cactus filled view of the desert is like something from an alien planet.
They provided some very American-looking imagery and some that we were surprised to see. So we decided to make a this collage.
Like Mark Twain said: "Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness." We're happy that we could dispell modern myths.
Final thoughts
This image of a well-deserved break at the airport says it all - over 15 successful meetings in just three days. A tempo that is pretty hard to match.
Let's see what next year's MASTERs is going to bring.
Yours sincerely,
MikroElektronika