STH at LTX2023 and LTT Studio in Vancouver BC

This past weekend I had the chance to go to LTX Expo 2023 in Vancouver, BC. It was a great time meeting folks at the show. I was actually shocked by hundreds of STH readers/ viewers that came and said hi.

STH at LTX2023 in Vancouver BC

First off, LTX was a blast. It was great seeing Dr. Ian Cutress (formerly Anandtech, now TechTechPotato) who has been a friend for years.

At the start of the day, I was able to make two screwdrivers, including one for Bryan #2 who is going back to school in September as a thank you.

Jeff Geerling joined me, and then Linus did as well. I was the cameraman for this video’s thumbnail and Jeff did a great job showing off the show, including just after when we toured the LTT studio.

We did things like a charity live stream at the LTX show floor that Jeff and Chris from Crosstalk put on.

If you want to watch this one, I was the second guest after LTT Jake T and Wendell was just after me.

On Saturday, after making the screwdriver, it felt a bit like Wendell (Levle1Techs) and I had a buddy system going. I went up to talk to him about an idea I had in the middle of the show floor and we ended up getting to talk to tons of folks who would come up to us. We chatted about home labs and servers. We signed a bunch of things, including keyboards, passes, shirts, and even an IBM Z series uncut wafer. We ended up not getting many steps in, and certainly not lunch since we were standing in 2-3 spots just talking to readers/ viewers all day. I was a bit shocked by how many folks came up to me since the demographic in the building felt like it was in the smaller part of our demographic age distribution on STH.

Later in the afternoon, Wendell and I jumped on with Adam from PC World and JJ from ASUS and did a live stream from the show floor:

We saw so many people it was not until around 4PM that we stopped to get lunch.

Sunday I started my day with a pre-LTX seaplane (or floatplane?) ride around Vancouver. The seaplane terminal was attached to the convention center and a 20-minute ride was not too bad. Plus, I find these things fun.

I also was able to tell Will Taillac that I went to my first LAN party. I still have not sat at a table in one, but I felt like this was some big personal growth. Will has been very busy at his main job, but he took a few minutes to let me know that is something I need to remedy.

In the afternoon, we had a homelab panel with Jake, Jeff, Crafty Jeff (Jeff @ Craft Computing), Chris, Wendell, and me. It was hard to take a picture since I was on stage and I have not found a link to the video. Hopefully this tweet, or X, embeds.

Do you have your own homelab? #LTX2023 @LTXexpo @CraftComputing @Level1Techs @LinusTech pic.twitter.com/NilwbuRaFP

— DaPoets (@DaPoets42) July 30, 2023

By the end, I was certainly tired, but it was a lot of fun, but there was one more fun bit that if you watched Jeff Geerling’s video above you might have seen. I rented a car and went with JeffyG and Cary Golomb (The Phawx) and we did a 7:30PM tour of the LTT studios, with a quick A&W Root Beer stop along the way.

Touring the LTT Studio

It was great to see the LTT studio evolve since I was there for the Jellyfish Fryer video in 2019. The build set was completely different.

We also saw how places that were effectively storage warehouses when I was there in 2019 are now popular sets like on the WAN Show set.

Even areas like the camera and grip areas had been finished since I was there.

Here is a quick look at the workshop.

I was going to do a full build video, but then Gerald Undone did one yesterday. If you want to see around, Gerald does amazing studio tours.

This tour was great. When I did the Jellyfish fryer about four years prior, that was one of the things that helped me understand the basics of how these studios work. I tell folks that seeing the studio for the first time was a major contributor to STH having a YouTube channel, even though I did not take Linus’ advice until 2020. Still, the channel is now on a good trajectory.

It has been fairly wild growth this year which I had not anticipated. That is leading us to expand plans to build a bigger studio in the next month. We are on a big push to do a month’s worth of content in 15 days to hopefully make the transition transparent to our readers. Seeing the standard for a studio always helps give us some ideas.

Final Words

The flight home yesterday was rough. We were delayed and had a long WiFi-less Boeing 737 Max flight since I was on Air Canada.

To be transparent, I did 5 cities in 7 days last week, then was with folks from 7:30AM to 10PM (or later) on both weekend days in Vancouver. Having a Monday without Internet connectivity was very challenging. We are a bit behind and will hopefully catch up later this week. In the meantime, I just wanted to share what is going on.