Being delayed 2 days due to global warming, puking my guts out and not being able to eat or drink for 24 hours, and losing my voice couldn’t even ruin the SXSW Interactive Festival. This conference was truly inspiring. A week full of web & interactive design geekdom with no shortage of things to do. If your in the web development trenches you MUST get there at least once.
I, in good company with 3 other IMA cohorts (see Daniel’s blog post), managed to hear gems and nuggets in several sessions from head honchos of 37 Signals, Flickr, Digg, StumbleUpon, WordPress, MediaTemple, and the list goes on.
One of my favorite panels was “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?“, because I deal with the issues they discussed nearly every day. Unfortunately I missed several things due to mother nature, such as the Mark Zuckerberg keynote debacle, or the Respect panel featuring one of my hero’s Jeffery Zeldman, but I left feeling satisfied, validated, and full of ideas. Next year we’ll definitely be more prepared to rawk!
I even got suckered into an interview, by a nice girl from Advertising Anarchy, while taking a break and juicing up my computer in the hall. For the record, I don’t hate Microsoft (I’m using Windows right now!), just not a big fan of Silverlight. I’m more of a Flash guy I suppose you could say, so maybe I’m biased. The Silverlight promotion just seemed over forced.
