Most conferences have to appeal to a large group of people to sell tickets to pay for the cost of renting space/insurance/etc, but since obviously an online conference doesn’t have those costs, Think Vitamin had the freedom to choose a very specific topic, in this case CSS3 and in the future HTML5 (already signed up!) and create tracks specifically based on this smaller topics knowing that the lack of travel would attract/enable enough people and the best speakers on the topic. The output? Amazing content from the industry leaders on a specific topic. I learned/was inspired about CSS3 10 times more then I was in the 3 CSS3 speeches I attended at SXSW. Partly this is just due to the fact that I wasn’t hung over and wasn’t worries about planning which other tracks and what I needed to go with next and where I needed to meet my friends… or where I checked in on Gowalla This isn’t SXSW fault, but anything in meat space is infinitely more complicated from an attendee perspective. Online you can get yourself a cup of coffee, you can cough, you can answer the phone if need be, etc. Complete freedom all the while being able to attend.

On this same line, it seems we got the pick of the litter in terms of speakers as I imagine them also being in their PJs in their hometowns with their families is way more an attractive option then flying around the globe, living in hotels and getting dressed up for a single hours worth of work. This level of comfort was obviously attractive to the speakers who many were also fresh off the SXSW/Mix train as well…   like Andy Clarke who decided to have a cigarette in the middle of his presentation. Not that I condone smoking, but why not? Wasn’t going to bother me as a nonsmoker… I am like 10,000 miles away. Andy felt more comfortable and I am sure were got a better presentation because of it.

So quick review, conference started at 1pm EST with Molly Holzschlag going over CSS3 layout options and where they stand in development and support of browsers. Next the Squared Eye guys, Matthew Smith & Sean Gaffney, talked about typography in CSS3… this time being able to finish their presentation without an alarm evacuating the building (Poor Matt Smith’s speech at SXSW was interrupted only a week early). Next up we had Andy Clark going over CSS3 best practices and careful degradation and finished up with Jina Bolton talking about CSS3 visual effects.  Each was a fantastic speech and specific enough to feel like I learned something without being yet another walkthrough of “cool things CSS3 promises”.

The conference cost 150 dollars to attend and there were about 200 attendees.  Even if many of them got the student discount, Think Vtiamin walked away with 20k with their only expenses being WebEx and paying speakers. Now I don’t know the going rate of SXSW or what WebEx costs, but I imagine that per hour investment (work to create presentations and actually give speech), I bet this conference was more lucrative to the speakers and creators then most, something that I hope will entice more people to do online conferences for a lot of different topics.

So thus far all good right? Well there were a couple of drawbacks and a couple of things I would change, fortunately all little and all things that may adjust once “we” get the hang of this online conference thing. There were some sound issues with getting people setup and normalized (definitely just something that needs to be ironed out), the webex system would have been great if it was more integrated in terms of collecting links or not trying to take over my whole screen during speeches and having to switch back and forth to chat. We figured out a work around, but each speech we had to go in and change the apps settings. Lastly the recording only being one long recording is annoying. I wish it was broken down per speech.

I will be attending SXSW next year. This doesn’t replace the social interaction and idea building you get when you meet with your colleagues, I don’t think it is trying. But monthly conferences like will enable me to keep on top of new and changing technologies as well as keep me inspired to learn and create. If I can sit here in my Baltimore suburb in my PJs with my cat on my lapt and still be inspired I will gladly hand over 150 a month to be educated and inspired.

Got up, headed down and grabbed some coffee and walked to the convention center (about 3 blocks from my hotel) in the rain to the convention center. Needless to say I arrived very wet and cold.

First presentation for the day was “Nobody Likes a Prototype” on how you can use different methods like light HTML/commercial style tricks that you can use to create prototypes that will sell your ideas. #PrototypingWebApps

On next to “Dashboard Design: Why your baby is Ugly”. Interesting speech about not using the same old visualizations and how to pack in the most in the space you have without over complicating it. Couple little hints I picked up on that I hope will make some good visualizations such as highlighting any major data issues versus letting the users find it, pie charts are a complete waste and using census data to test. #WhyBabyisUgly

After that “Getting Better: The Designer’s Path From Good To Great”. This was my favorite presentation in all of SXSW. I am going to blog about this separately, so I won’t get into too much detail, but it was inspiring and really hit home for me in terms of things I can/will do to change my goals and career path. #GettingBetter

Then we had lunch at PF Changs and let Mikey go shopping for more schwag.

Headed upstairs int he Austin convention center to the Twitter 140 Conference however I think we misinterpreted what it would be and thought it was more twitters influence on the topics then the topics in a short 20 minute (twitteresque) format. Not to say they were bad, but they were pretty repetitive so we booked out early.

Headed back home to the hotel and napped for 2 hours due to sheer exhastion. Woke up and headed to the Iron Cactus to enjoy our last night and some home made Guac (my favorite thing about SXSW).Walked over to the Mashable party and met some cool people while waiting in line. Party was pretty decent, but we had an early flight so we left about 1am.

Back to the hotel for some packing, a movie and a lot of sleep.

Overall awesome SXSW. I can’t wait for next year! Someone definitely needs to do quarterly meetups.

Didn’t make it to my first two panels… getting out of bed was too painful so I just took it slow.

Headed over the to conference to attend the 11 o’clock Gary Vaynerchuk speech. Although I can’t actually tell you what the speech was about, it was inspiring as all Gary’s stuff is. #RefreshGary

Next I stayed in the same room to watch the Evan Williams keynote simulcast. I am so glad I wasn’t in the live room because OMG how crap it was. I was glad noone was around so we could speak freely about how shit it was. This is not a reflection on Evan at all, but the interviewer Umair Haque seemed as though he was more interested in listening to himself talk. Anyway… Evan announced the upcoming @Anywhere platform. Looks pretty cool… integrates twitter conversation into web sites. #EvanWilliams

Next I headed to the trade show floor which was pretty crap and I bailed after 5 minutes.

Headed back to the hotel for a nice rest and clean up a bit.

At 6pm we headed over to Austin on Rails at Buffalo Billards. Dan got to hang out with “his peeps” while Mikey and I took advantage of the free drink coupons and scored ourselves some of the Black Otherinbox shirts (way nicer then the tan ones IMO).

After that we wandered down to the Gowalla party (<3 Gowalla) and ended up waiting in line for an hour and 15 minutes ONLY to get rained on and leave about 30 minutes after getting in. Did score a nice Gowalla tshirt and some gowalla stickers so all was not lost.

Headed back to the hotel at about 10 to get Dan and Mikey some warmer gear and we decided to just stick around locally and ended up at the Paradise bar.

Another day done… 1 more left. I will be sad when it is over, but I am looking forward to sleeping in my bed.

Head over to the conference hall to catch the 2:00 speech called Your Design Process is Killing You. Got there and there was a line. Decided to sit outside and wait and watched people leaving in droves…. decided it wasn’t worth it. Spent some time working on some requirements for my new project.

Mikey picked the next speech and we headed to It’s Time to Save the World with Design Thinking. To be honest it wasn’t what I would have chosen, but I was pleasantly surprised. As opposed to a speech it was a core conversations so all the attendees contributed… which was a good and bad thing. Glad I went, was a new experience. #SaveTheWorld

Wandering the hallways I ran into my friend Mark Krysnky who gave me a tip on there might be some discussion about Buzz at the gmail speech, so we headed down there. Unfortunately A LOT of people heard that tip and the place was packed (seriously SXSW why use small rooms if you have big ones available?!?!). Ended up drinking some coffee and working on more requirements.

Headed back to the room and got my camera and snapped some pics from the Omni roof. (Will post later).

Headed to Chupacabra’s to grab some dinner and a margarita. Good…. not as good as the Iron Cactus, but still good. Mikey made some new friends and we headed over to the Mashable party to check the line. VERY VERY VERY long.

We decided instead to head over to the Blip.TV party. Long story short, we got lost, ended up following some guy to his room in a hotel. Sorry random guy!

Made it to the Blip.TV party. IMO it was a total bust, although I think Mikey liked it. Seemed very markety… people not talking about what they have done or created but more name dropping… just not my thing.

Got a message from Gary Vaynerchuck about his not so secret wine party and headed around the block to check it out. More my sort of people, lots of devs and personalities I recognized, good music, way better drinks. Dan, Mikey and I worked our way to the couch and Mikey made friends with our booth buddies who apparently are involved in making his favorite tacos or something. Dan got a text message that Gary moved the party (WTF?!!?), but we were lazy and decided to stay.

About 1 o’clock I decided to check out so that I could attend some speeches tomorrow (full day!) and there are a bunch of parties I want to his up.

Apparently with old age I can only really rock it every other night, so here I am… almost 3 am… took a hot bath, dropped some more motrin and am watching Deception on tv.

Life is good.

Day 2 started out with dragging my ass out of bed at 8:30 and heading on over to the Hilton for Chris Messina’s Activity Streams speech. I am not going to cover any of the actual thoughts I have on any of the speeches in these posts as I feel that they each require their own blog entries (well the more interesting ones), so a short review… it was good, it was interesting and I left inspired (already have plans for use in a new project I am working on). #GettingStreamy

Presentation 2 was a panel by Happy Cog titled “We F*cked Up. Now What? Exploring Failure, Together “. Really really interesting. I felt a lot of empathy for the stories as I definitely related.  Extremely entertaining and funny.#SXSWFailure

Next up was something a bit more technical. We headed off to the web framework battle between Ruby on Rails, Sinatra, Zope, Seaside and Symphony. No clear winner, but went over like 5 aspects of frameworks from barrier to entry, templating, scalability and database support. Was good to hear about some of the future Rails 3 stuff. #FrameWorkBattleRoyale

Following the lively debate, Dan and I headed over to watch the CSS Framework shootout. This was less fiesty then the web framework and they showed each other a lot of love. I was sad to see LESS not represented, especially with Compass being there. To be honest I don’t think i walked away with much that I didn’t know, however I am pretty familiar with frameworks. I did get a little background about the frameworks which was nice. It will be interesting to see how they evolve with HTML5 and the semantic web. #CSSFrameworks

Rounded up the day early (3 oclock speech) about HTML5 and CSS3. This was an interesting speech in the sense of it is right in my wheelhouse but it was presented very awkwardly. The speakers knew what they were talking about, but the idea of it being a show and tell, the only way this would have worked successfully, well it wasn’t not successful, it was just awkward, but it should have been more like a recorded presentation where the speakers just started and stopped the video so there was a lot less waiting time. BUT that being said, it was a great example of where we are headed and inspiring about the future of design. #CSS3DesignHTML5

Back to the hotel for some relaxation and dinner at the Omni.

Thanks to Dan and his boss Gary Vaynerchuck, we got VIP access to the live Diggnation. Really this isn’t my sort of thing, lots of fanboys and younger kids, but it was fun and totally worth the wait. I got to see Leo Laporte crowd surf. Nuff said.

Next we headed to the Happy Cog Karoke thing which was just to long a wait, ,so we hopped in a bicycle cap and headed over to Emo’s for a long island ice tea. We then walked around 6th and ended our evening meeting some of Mikey’s coworkers at Buffalo Billards.

Very drunk and very much in pain we headed back to the Omni at about 2am (which thanks to nature was actually 3).

Presentation 1, “Getting Excited About Typography”, was good. I was stuck sitting on the floor so I didn’t get to observe as much as I want so it probably was more impressive with the visuals. I am however now inspired to go home and try and make my own font. #GetYourGlyphon

Presentation 2, “Simple Steps to Great Web Design”, was better for the 10 minutes it went on, until we were evacuated from the building by an alarm. Slides

We took this evacuation notice as a message from god to get some rest and headed back to the hotel, grabbed showers and relaxed. Headed over to the Iron Cactus for some of their famous guac and had a couple margaritas. Headed back for an early night, hung out on the roof of the Omni for a bit and checked out the view (again, more pics later). Went to bed like 10 (yeah I know… but 1 hour sleep and Saturday parties looming).

So far so good.

Attend Speeches By the Speaker not the Content

Noone at SXSW is going to tell you anything you probably didn’t know. We are in the age of RSS when someone blogs their thoughts before the thought is even done. For me SXSW is being inspired. Seeing people who are inspiring speakers is a way better experience then worrying if the content directly applies to you. For example, I am not really interested in Wine or Video Blogging, but Gary Vaynerchuck’s speeach on the topic was the most inspiring speech there and was the topic of conversation for many of my discussions with others.

People Will Not Bite

We are geeks, we all have a little social anxiety… but your here. SXSW is a social convention. Don’t expect a library of quiet geeks tapping away at their computers. If you come to the convention you are basically putting yourself out there as someone who wants to be social. If you see someone who you admire, follow their work, is talking about something cool or is just a random person that doesn’t smell, say “Hi”. A simple “I really like what you are doing with X” will totally make their day and you don’t have to go all fanboy on them. These people are not movie stars, they aren’t celebs. They REALLY DO their own shopping at Target and Walmart just like you. The fact that you recognize them enough and appreciate them enough to say hi will give them a really big kick and they will most likely be really nice… and if they aren’t, at least you know who to unsubscribe to when you get home.

Bring Money

SXSW is expensive. The conference is expensive, the cabs are expensive, the drinks are expensive, the food is expensive, hell at 4 bucks a bottle the water is expensive. There are a couple of things you can do like buying your own water and Whole Foods that can help. Hopping party to party for free drinks will also keep your bar tab a little lower, but do keep in mind that free drinks = line to get in. This isn’t a conference to attend if you are on super tight purse strings.

Get a Hotel Withing Walking Distance of the Convention Center

Due to bad planning, we ended up at a hotel near the airport. I would say our cab bills are probably near 500 bucks. That is almost the same amount as our hotel. If we took the 500 bucks and put it back into our “hotel” fund we would have been staying at a pimp suite right next to the convention center where we wouldn’t have had to coordinate cabs, waking up, going to bed… everyone could have just don’t their own thing. Just do it, thank me later.

Plan Downtime

You will constantly hear “it is a marathon, not a sprint” and it is so true. You are not going to be able to keep up the pace of conferences, partying, lack of sleep and honestly just people. It isn’t even a matter of getting tired, people constantly buzzing in your ear all the time will drive you insane. Take a look at your schedule, figure out what you absolutely can’t miss and plan a early evening in the mix and then some more chill activies. We went to the Alamo Drafthouse twice, a movie theater that serves food and liquor at your seats. Still social, but everyone STFUing for a couple hours was of great help. I also found myself after day 2 missing music, and not just music but a chance to zone. I found myself waking up at 7 am (like now) to have a couple of minutes to myself without having to talk. I love my friends, but the lack of “centering” time can make you insane.

Room With Someone Who Is Like You

If you can’t afford rooming alone, make sure whomever you room with has similar habbits. I love Mikey, but his need for all the lights out, freezing cold temeratures (which I like while asleep, just not when I am awake) and complete lack of noise, completely conflict with my lifestyle. I think this sort of thing wears on you as well and makes you  a bit snappy. I think this also goes for just hanging out with your friends, especially people you don’t actually live with. People all have crazy habbits, and everyone is out of their element. It is hard to go with the flow for 5 days, especially when hung over, give your friends some space. Cut people a break, take a break from them and just mix it up a bit.

You Don’t Have to Be Everywhere Your Friends Are

This is actually mostly my fault. I spent a good deal of the beginning of the conference trying to coordinate fun for my group. You are not joined at the hip, you don’t need to see the same speeches as your friends, infact I would encourage that you first look at the schedule and see what you want to see and plan what you want to do, before looking at social schedule tools like Sched and surfing your friends plans… if stuff overlaps that is cool as you will have stuff to talk about, but I think some of my programmer friends missed some good speeches cause I wasn’t interested in going and I didn’t go to a couple of things I probably would have because I was going with them to stuff. At the same point, don’t stress about it as it will all be on podcast.

Follow Up With Your Connections

All those cool people you met the night before will remember you for a couple of days… and you them. Send the emails, facebook connects and twitter followings quickly! Unless completely smashed (and in that case maybe it is better off you don’t reconnect), we all remember who we partied with for a couple of days, after that people just become ‘that guy who did/said that thing at that party at some convention’. Connections don’t cost anything and usually are pretty passive… connect with your new friends immediately and then involve yourself in the conversation when appropriate. Yes maybe in 6 months that awesome flash guy you spoke to for 20 minutes at a bar might not recognize you, but knowing that you are his facebook friend gives you way more credit then random stranger when involving yourself in a conversation.

That all being said, SXSW was a great conference and I am off to plan my next one already!

• How to Rawk SXSW
• Working Alone Sucks: Join the Coworking Revolution
• Scailing Rails Applications in the Cloud
• Making Whuffie: Raising Social Capital in Online Communities
• CSS3: What’s Now, What’s New and What’s Not?
• Video Blogging: Turning Wine into Gold
• Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins
• Quitter: How to Leave Your Perfectly Good Job
• Bruce Sterling Session

Twitter – Good old twitter… I can tweet my experiences, follow the #sxsw hash tag and get the up to the minute happenings. 

Facebook – I will be adding people I meet to my social network. 

my.sxsw.com –  I have selected all the events I plan to attend and now I have a personalized calendar that is integrated with my google calendar and in turn is viewable on my phone. Also has a private sort of twitter app, although I think I will probably just use twitter

BrightKite –  I will be posting my locations so that people looking for me can find me easily as well as be able to see which of my friends are where.

Viddler – I will be posting videos so that my friends and family who aren’t able to make it can “play along”. 

DropCard – A service where I setup a “business card” and then when I meet people I just txt message Dropcard their email and it sends them my business card.

It is amazing how I ever did a conference without this stuff! I will have a follow up post about what worked, what didn’t, etc.

This weekend I had the unique experience of contributing in the RailsRumble 2008 contest…. because of course I didn’t have enough to do with my customer work

Overall I think we came up with a great entry and given the fact that we only worked 48 hours on it I am really proud of what my team did. I want to thank Dan, Nate and Will for putting up with my insanity and exhastion. I couldn’t have asked for a better team.

That all being said… there are things I would do differently next time (aren’t there always?) and here are some lessons I learned for next years RailsRumble, MerbRumble (If that comes through) or any real short term app development.

Make Sure ALL Members of your Team are Prepared

Although this is really circumstancial in that this was a volunteer contest so it takes a backseat to work/life however I feel that we could have benefitted to a couple of preprep meetings over the couple of weeks before the competition. We had many document exchanges, but there is nothing like everyone getting on a call/webcam/campfire and just going over their understanding and making sure they are on the same page. Although this won’t stop technical problems from arising (and they will) this will stop those “so how do you see this working” questions in the middle of your time crunch.

Take the Next Day Off

Although I was fortunate to only have a light work load on the following Monday, I was dragging. My body was going through caffiene withdrawl and even after 14 hours sleep I was exhausted. Infact up until about an hour ago (over 36 hours after) I didn’t feel “right”. I don’t care what age you are, you just shouldn’t do that to your body…. that often

Get Sleep Before the Last Day

We started off fairly strong and slept a bit on Friday night/Saturday mornings… this got us going well on Saturday night, but come Sunday morning we were dragging and snappy at each other. Holding it together till Sunday night was rough and there was many points where I felt that I would rather sleep then finish. Perhaps being better prepared  would have helped,

Environment Preparation

I think we really excelled here. Dan spent times going through the plugins and gems we wanted to use and made sure that he understand how they worked and I did some trial runs in setting up the server and getting it up and running with github. These two tasks probably saved us tons of time in plugin/gem debugging and administration, neither which would have helped us achieve our goal in anyway. Dan wrote a great article outline the work he did before hand and I signed up to Linode and ran practice drills so I knew the environment inside and out. All that prep work aside, the Rumble threw up for a little curve by not allowing us to be administrators of our own github account so I had to setup the configuration different then planned. Having a grasp of how the system worked though was a great help as I easily adjusted my plans and we were completely 100% up and running within the first hour in terms of checking in, checking out and deploying.

Don’t take Yourself Seriously … You Win no Matter What

I think if we had taken ourselves seriously there would be a lot of disappoinment in the end. We didn’t win anything… infact we didn’t come close. I am not going to gripe or complain about it, I think Dan says everything I want to say here, but I honestly feel we can walk away proud as we created an app that I personally am in awe of as well as I think something that people can use. It is a great showpiece for our portfolio and best of all it accomplishes a goal.

To sum it up, will I do the rumble again? I dunno. Honestly if the judging/rating system doesn’t get worked out I probably won’t be doing this particular rumble again as we can easily do the same sort of thing for a portfolio piece on our time frame when we are ready…. but that being same the community was a lot of fun and I have heard whisperings around of a nonprofit rumble for all Ruby frameworks that may happen and I would definately be interested in that.