Well I just flew in from Miami and boy are my arms tired.
Actually, the trip left me exhausted with non-stop geekdom from Thursday’s BarCamp Miami right through the G(r)eek Dinner Saturday night.
Mainly the trip left me full of new ideas and insights and new ways of looking at what I’m trying to do with my fledgling business.
BarCamp Miami was just a bang-up success. Kudos of course to Alex de Carvalho for pulling it all together. More than 300 folks showed up to the beautiful Miami Performing Arts Center – definitely the most dramatic setting for a BarCamp ever. I elected to throw together a session on “Why your PR agency sucks” and despite my best efforts, the room was packed and there was some great back and forth between developer types and marketing types on how we sell ourselves and our products. Michael Tangeman has some thoughts on the session.
I also attended Christopher Haupt’s session on giving Rails some love (and better documentation) and Jose Castillo’s session on the Web for children – a subject close to my heart and one on which I will spend a bit of time discussing at SXSW. Jose helped launch gotrybe.com – a social networking site for school age children focused on physical fitness and health. And as previously mentioned, Andy Singleton of client Assembla announced he would Build a Dot Com in 24 Days, documenting the whole thing along the way.
Friday was Future of Web Apps day and the good folks at Carsonified put on quite a show. It’s always great to see so many familiar faces as well as putting names to Twitter icons. And double mega kudos to Brian and Tantek for putting together a fantastic program. All you have to know is it opened with Kathy Sierra and wrapped up with Gary Vaynerchuck.
Saturday night featured greek food and geek table dancing. And then Hugh MacLeod showed up. And after a discussion of French varietals and goat lips, I headed back out into the night.
I have a million take-aways from the trip and I’m still filtering it all through the old cerebellum. And we’re only a few days away from SXSW.
