Node Summit

So I flew out to San Francisco last week for the Node Summit conference. I wasn't sure exactly what to expect. The first event was the NodeUp live pod cast at the Bottom of the Hill bar. I was in the Mission immediately prior to that and it was a long walk (after 5.5 hours of walking) to get there. The crowd seemed to be almost all developers and it was surprisingly international. I got to meet some folks I admire from the Internet like Pedro Teixeira. Tim Caswell and TJ Holowaychuck (my current programming hero) were both there and Ryan Dahl eventually arrived as well. I learned an interesting thing about myself: even if you take a bar and fill it up with ubernerds, I still feel uncomfortable and count the minutes until I can make a quiet exit.

Tuesday morning I caught a shuttle from a hotel near my room to the event, which was a really nice service to have (although I guess I would have happily walked as well). The conference was a lot bigger and more extravagant than I was anticipating. Many large companies were represented including Microsoft, Ebay, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Sabre, Visa, Google, and more. The discussion panels were pretty hit or miss (mostly miss I guess), with a few being really interesting. I did a lot of networking and hopefully some of these connections will prove valuable in the near future. I went to both of the Nodejitsu workshops, which were packed beyond capacity.

Wednesday was more of the same but there was a good panel with Ryan Dahl and Brendan Eich on the future of JavaScript. I asked a question to the panel of Platform as a Service companies a question and the moderator, Jolie O'Dell said "and by the way you're nail polish is bitchin'" as I returned to my seat. :-)

I didn't manage to find any after parties via the twitters, although I probably would have opted to go home and nap anyway. I did get to hang out with the Nodejitsu crew Thursday evening though, which was fun.