Connect 2013 Roundup

Ah, another large conference in Florida draws to a close and I can feel the first beginnings of the Lotusphere flu seeping into my bones ready for flight back.

So, what was this one like? In two words, “bloody busy”. The first couple of days were a complete whirl where I was never quite sure what was happening from one hour to the next, after that I at least had a plan but it was still mayhem.

This year I started the week with a to-do list, a list of clients to find and chat to, more potential clients to find and see if they were interested, 2 sessions to present (1 Best practises and 1 Show and Tell), 2 sponsored events, and all the dozens of other community events that needed to be visited. All in all, it left me completely buggered.

Compared to my roommates and fellow LDCers Ben Poole and Julian Woodward I rarely lasted past 24:00 each night
(yes there were 3 of us in a room as we were conferencing on the cheap, saving the money for client drinks).
Julian had about 18 hours sleep for the 7 days total, tending to come to the room for about 1 hour in the early mornings lay on his bed like a Borg, then rise recharged and machine his way through the next day.

My sessions went both well and terrible, the content and the delivery both went OK. But I had terrible time slots. The limitless languages one was just before the main Wednesday party and against Paul Mooney’s & Bill Buchan’s worst practices which pretty much killed it dead, here is the slidedeck:

The other one was on the Thursday morning at 8.00am ‘Show and Tell’ dead slot, with Julian Robichaux and while we had far more people than we expected, Julian’s content deserved a full house

Ah well, someone has to fill those slots so I can hardly complain,

I also had a few questions and bugs to raise about IBM connections and therefore ventured to the labs to get them resolved. The connections guy I met was very helpful, but the real credit goes to Maureen Leland who was passing and said hello, then asked if I could provide any useful feature requests for connections features (I asked for a navigable ATOM API Map). It made me feel like a million dollars that a senior IBM dev would not only remember me but ask for my opinion on ANY matter. It’s the existence of IBMers like Maureen and Susan Bulloch that ensures that there is still a vibrant groupware/collaboration/social community helping IBM to make a $1,000,000,000 a year from a product that might have well otherwise disappeared into the annals of time.

Going mob-handed with the rest of LDC was brill, what with Matt and I both presenting, Julian being the president of Penumbra and Ben being the lead dev of the well-received socialbizug.org. It was a good showing. However the best part was the endless laughing, some mornings my ribs hurt from it 🙂

This year’s LDC giveaway went perfectly, but Ben is going to do a blog on it so I can skip that bit.

On the final night Julian Woodward treated me to the most perfect drink in the world, my life is complete:

 

Loads of of other stuff happened including the awesome geek challenge, but what passes for my mind is a still a jetlagged flu-ridden whirlwind so I’m sure there will be more bits to remember and update the site with, but all in all I’m going to agree with IBM that this was not the end but the beginning of the conference.

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