Minnestar
Minnebar 2
I’m rather late doing my writeup on Minnebar 2007. I guess the advantage of being so late is that I get to reference all the great write-ups that other people have done about Minnebar 2007. Let me start by highlighting that Ben Edwards, Luke Francl and Dan Grigsby did an absolutely amazing, fantastic supercalifragilistic job of putting together Minnebar. It was simply stunning guys – and you’ve set an incredible bar to try to exceed next year.
Here is the only thing that is hard about Minnebar. Both this year and last year it happened to coincide with one of the first, really nice weekends of spring. It’s hard being a Minnesotan and foregoing one of those great days to hang out inside. However, you are handsomely rewarded for the tradeoff. I didn’t see a lot of the people I had invited. You all missed out!
This year was simply great. The attendance was nearly triple last year. There were so many people that I knew in attendance that I ended up not going to that many sessions. In addition to the folks I knew, there were a lot of new faces to meet. I didn’t do any formal presenting this year, but I did get asked to lead the Q&A session with David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. It was a fun time, David is a really cool guy and I liked much of what he had to say. Tim Elliott got a recording of the session, with David’s permission, and I’m putting a copy of that here for archival purposes, with permission from Tim. (How Creative Commons of us all.)
I also want to give a big thanks to the guys from ip:House who provided the free WiFi service for the event. It was simply stunning in quality and capability, and not a single hitch the whole day. Great job guys!
I’m already looking forward to the next Minnedemo, and the next Minnebar in 2008!
Minnebar 2 on April 21st
Spring is here, and along with it is the 2nd annual Minnebar “unconference”. Reserve the date now and block out April 21st on your calendar. Yes it’s a Saturday, and it’s going to be a nice day in early spring, but it’s a great time and you’ll learn a lot and meet some great people. Go to the site and sign up on the wikipage now.
If you are curious, Minnebar is the close relative of Minnedemo. Minnedemo is focused on demo’s and occurs twice a year, just for an evening. The most recent one was the Holiday Minnedemo. Minnebar is a complete conference and is focused on topics, taking a full day.
Holiday MinneDemo
Minneapolis is becoming a much cooler place to be a techie geek, startup business sort of guy. Thanks to the hard work of a very small group of people last year Minneapolis had it’s first ever Minnebar. MinneBar is a BarCamp event, also known as an “unconference”. The idea is simple, a bunch of people of like interests (in this case all things geek) convene on one spot and self-organize into a worthwhile conference. It’s like wiki meets conference.
Anyway, the 2nd edition of the more frequent and shorter minnedemo has been scheduled for December 11th at Acadia Cafe.
Minnedemo is different than Minnebar in that it’s shorter, somewhat more social, and features short demos rather than longer form presentations. I missed the first one due to a business trip, but I’m definitely going to be at the 2nd edition!
Check it out, sign up, and meet some great people. Plus, Road Sign Math is a sponsor. 🙂