Month: February 2006

Sunday’s meetup was a success — at peak, we were 16 in total, all having good food, good beer and great conversation. My thanks to everyone who came, and special thanks to Tara Hunt for helping me put the whole thing together!

Ross took pictures of the event, covering both the gathering inside 21st Amendment and the accordion performance outside. Thanks, Ross! I put the photos in an album, which you can view in album or slideshow format.

Click the photo to start the slideshow.

Tara wasn’t actually in town to attend the event, but Chris Messina, pictured below, stood in for her and also promoted the event locally. Thanks, Chris!

Click the photo to start the slideshow.

Dove

bars. Yum.

And yes, the actual content of

the Developer

Relations Conference has been not only informative, but in

some cases, downright inspiring, especially the presentation from the

dude from O’Reilly titled Developers Just Want to Have Fun. I’ve been

taking notes for all the sessions I’ve managed to catch and will post

them once I’ve formatted and cleaned them up a bit.

So far, the Evans Data Corporation’s Developer Relations Conference has been quite good — information-rich presentations delivered by good speakers to a interesting and varied crowd — but I’ll save all the techie/marketing stuff for the technical blog, The Farm. I’m going to report on the more touchy-feely stuff here so as not to bore my not-so-technical readers to tears.

Rather than have lunch in some stuffy hotel conference dining room, they herded us outside to this lovely tent adjoining the hotel. In case you were wondering, it’s springlike (about 14 degrees C) and sunny in San Francisco today. Here’s a photo of the tent:

I was expecting the standard salad-chicken-vanilla cake fare, but was pleasantly surprised by what we actually got:

• The starter: A sweet salad with boston lettuce, grapes, apples and candied walnuts
• The main course: duck and polenta with string beans. That’s right. Duck. Polenta.
• Dessert: a nice custard-and-chocolate chip tart.

This is far better than any other conference fare I’ve ever been served. Mind you, I’m typically at developer cons, and food isn’t often high on the priority list, other than having plenty. I’m sure that “suitier” conferences have food on this level or better, but I’m a grateful geek for getting the “Food Network” treatment here. I salute Evans Data with a filet mignon on a flaming sword for the lunch.

I’m currently sitting in a seminar at the Evans Data Developer Relations Conference in the Argent Hotel in downtown San Francisco. It’s a developer relations conference rather than a developer conference, which means that the event isn’t the “sausage party” to which I have become accustomed, but rather one with a more even male-female ratio.

The Windows/Mac ratio is still heavily Redmond-skewed. Until just now, I thought I was the only guy with a Mac laptop in attendance.

Noting this, I turned to Ross and said, “See? Only Mac in the house. I’ve just established myself as the rebel.”

“No,” he replied without skipping a beat, “you’ve established yourself as bait.”