Back home from Austin
SXSW 2007 is over and I’m back home now…I already miss the Texas BBQ. This year exceeded my expectations and was bigger and better than last year. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to make it a hat trick next year.
There were apparently something in the neighbourhood of 6000 geeks in attendance. I wonder how many websites went down while we were all in Austin suffering with the overloaded conference Wifi.
For the second year in a row, Kathy Sierra was at the top of my list of best sessions with her amazing ‘opening remarks’ on Saturday afternoon. The podcast has been posted and she just made a blog post covering part of it. I especially liked the WTF button and the ‘canyon of pain’ she talked about.
The first leg of my flight home on Wednesday was through Denver and Kathy happened to be on my flight. After getting off the plane, I summoned some fanboy nerve and decided to approach her and tell her how awesome her session was in person. She was very gracious and I appreciated that she asked me my name and shook my hand.
The last thing I said to her was ‘kick ass!’ and I meant it as homage to her concept of making users kick ass in using your website/app/product/etc. because I feel that she has helped to make me feel like I’m kicking ass when I can grasp her concepts and apply them to my work but I think it ended up sounding like some weird football fan yelp or something….”Booyah!” or something like that.
Hopefully she got what I meant and wasn’t scared for her safety.
I had a great time at SXSW also. It was my first year there, but won’t be my last. It was a pleasure meeting you also. Let’s sit down for a beer next year as well!