Minnebar Report
Today, aside from celebrating the second most awesome day of the year (I have to put the wedding anniversary before my birthday now), I had the opportunity to go to Minnebar. What is Minnebar you ask? Minnebar is part of Barcamp, which defines its gatherings as "an ad-hoc gathering born from the desire for people to share and learn in an open environment. It is an intense event with discussions, demos and interaction from participants". It is what some people call an "unconference". Basically anyone can sign up to lead a discussion in whatever topic the see fit (as long as they are technology and design oriented). So, here are my impressions of my first Minnebar.
I have to admit, I was actually late. Being my birthday today, I had no reason to wake up early, so I got there for the afternoon sessions. The first session I attended was my favorite. Since I have been exploring the startup company option for a while, I decided to go to a session oriented at startups. It was called "7 Deadly Sins of Startup Marketing" and was lead by, I believe a marketing consultant, Curt Prins. Very good advice for when your company is just starting out. I'll probably write another post about it later this week.
I went to two other sessions. One was about Adobe Illustrator. Basically some tips on how to do some neat effects, although it was hard to see some of the commands he was using from where I was (just three rows back). The third one was about CSS frameworks. Most of the people in those two sessions were design people, specializing in art and graphic design. I guess I realized there that this is one area I also enjoy. (I had a lot of fun working on the design for this blog!).
As I was leaving, I stopped by the demo session that was still going on in another room. If I had more time, I would have spent the rest of the afternoon there. There were some really fun demos (one called Scribbles, which had people drawing and mixing other drawings in some fun ways). There was also some attention given to iPhone development (which I think has been taking off after the SDK being released).
Overall, there were many sessions of very good quality (I'm sure I missed a lot of these). There were some sessions that looked more like student presentations or tutorials, but I don't think this lowered the value of the experience at all. The gathering factor is really great too. There are people exchanging ideas (and business cards) everywhere. But best of all, Minnebar is free! Free sessions, free food, and even free t-shirts. I really enjoyed it and hope to be able to go again next year.