Friday, October 23, 6:20 pm, I boarded a TGV in Orange with a well-planned itinerary: a short night at Lyon Saint-Exupéry, a flight to Amsterdam, a connection to San Francisco and an arrival late Saturday morning for the NTC Tech Connect 2026, held on October 26 and 27 at Nutanix headquarters in San Jose.

I finally set foot in my hotel on Sunday around 3 pm, a little over 53 hours after leaving Orange, and my suitcase decided to take even more of its time…

This is my second Tech Connect as a Nutanix Technology Champion, since the event did not take place in 2025, and I mentioned it in my article about my busy month of October: https://juliendumur.fr/en/nutanix-next-on-tour-paris-2026-my-october/. If you are wondering what the Tech Connect is all about, I invite you to read my article on the subject: https://juliendumur.fr/en/heading-to-nutanix-hq-in-san-jose-behind-the-scenes-of-ntc-tech-connect/. Here is the story of the outbound trip, which deserved an article all of its own.

Orange, Lyon, 4 am wake-up call

To catch a 6:30 am flight out of Lyon from Orange, I did not really have a choice: I had to leave the day before. The 6:20 pm TGV dropped me at Lyon Saint-Exupéry station around 7:40 pm, and I headed to the airport’s NH Hotel for what promised to be a short night.

Wake-up at 4 am, and at this stage of the trip, everything was still going exactly as planned…

A 1h40 delay and a missed connection

The storm sweeping across Europe that weekend got the better of my schedule from the very first flight: scheduled take-off at 6:30 am, actual take-off at 8:10 am. My connection to San Francisco was leaving Amsterdam at 9:50 am, and landing at 9:46 am quickly settled the matter. With four minutes to spare before the next flight left, it was over before I had even unbuckled my seatbelt.

Small consolation in the corridors of Schiphol, I met up with Jonas Hogman, another NTC also on his way to San Jose, with whom I had planned to travel. Next stop, the KLM help desk, where we spent 2 hours in the queue just to reach the counter.

The verdict: a night in Amsterdam at the CitizenM, and a rebooking the next morning through Frankfurt with Lufthansa.

I had already written about a “zero day” on the blog, the one from .NEXT 2025: https://juliendumur.fr/en/nutanix-next-2025-zero-day/. This one was going to last two.

Frankfurt, run Forrest, run!

Sunday, October 25, a new departure from Schiphol on a Lufthansa flight scheduled for 7:30 am, which eventually took off at 8 am: the switch to winter time that night was enough to push the departure back by 30 minutes. Landing in Frankfurt at 8:55 am instead of 8:35 am, we still had 1h15 before take-off for San Francisco, which looked comfortable on paper.

Only on paper. A bus transfer across the airport, then 45 minutes stuck at passport control, unavoidable since we were leaving the Schengen area, and to top it all off, a boarding gate on the opposite side of the airport.

So Jonas and I ran across the terminal and boarded the plane at 10:10 am, the exact scheduled departure time. Take-off finally happened at 10:20 am: for once, the plane’s delay worked in our favour.

San Francisco, without my suitcase

We landed in San Francisco at 1:35 pm local time, right on schedule despite the ten-minute delay at take-off, which makes it the only flight of the trip to keep to its timetable. At the airport, we met up with Kim Mount, but not with my suitcase, still in transit in Germany, with delivery to the hotel announced for the next day.

I was not really surprised: a tracker travels in my suitcase, and my wife and I had been following its position at the same time since the start of the journey. On Saturday, it had stayed at Schiphol with me:

During my flight to San Francisco, however, it never left Frankfurt. Positions recorded at 4:51 pm, 7:46 pm and then 9:16 pm European time, about twenty minutes before I landed, still at the airport, near the regional train station…

So I left the suitcase to its extended layover and reached the hotel around 3 pm with Kim and Jonas.

San Jose, survival kit from Target

No way was I going to start two days of sessions in the clothes I had been wearing since Saturday morning. Around 3:30 pm, I set off on foot with Kim Mount and Roger Lund towards Target, to put together the bare essentials while waiting for the suitcase, and incidentally to keep myself awake until the evening.

On the way, the conversation quickly drifted to how we use artificial intelligence day to day, from ethics to our working methods, such as “reverse prompting” or “spec-driven development”. Kim turned it into a blog post, which I invite you to read: https://itskimpossible.blog/walking-with-roger-julien-ai-upskilling-101/

The haul: a T-shirt, underwear, socks, toothpaste, a toothbrush and deodorant. Nothing glamorous, but it will do until the next day…

Tech Connect eve: NTCs, assemble!

6:30 pm, off to the Miniboss, where a good number of the NTCs in town for the Tech Connect had arranged to meet: Jeroen Tielen, Andrea Ribeiro, Patrick Damen, Bart Donders, Brad Burgess, Raj Patel and many others. Having been unable to attend .NEXT in Chicago this year, I had been looking forward to this reunion for a while, and after more than two days of travel, those few hours together made me forget about the suitcase (almost).

Back at the hotel at 9:30 pm, a reasonable time, with sessions starting first thing Monday morning.

And what about the suitcase? On Monday evening, at 7:41 pm, the tracker finally placed it on the right side of the Atlantic, near Palo Alto, a few dozen kilometres from my hotel:

Announced for the 26th, then pushed back to October 27 at 12:15 am, it finally reached the hotel on Monday evening, even before the promised time. Easy to spot with its five mana symbols, it came with two “RUSH” tags hastily scribbled by hand as a bonus, one for flight LH 997 to Frankfurt, the other for LH 454 to San Francisco.

Now on to the Tech Connect sessions, as far as the NDA will let me tell you about them. And if you want to compare with my previous participation, my account of the Tech Connect 2024 is right here: https://juliendumur.fr/en/my-2-ntc-tech-connect-2024-days/

Stay tuned…