We really love this blog. We started it almost exactly 6 months ago and it means a ton to both of us. We started with two posts a week – and then Josh started a new job. We downshifted to one post a week – and then Laine got a new job. We’ve managed to keep on keepin’ on at one post a week since then, which… well, we really love this blog.
One of the first things we ever did that made us sit up and realize that maybe we made a seriously effective team was give a nerd presentation – we talked about feature toggles as an architectural concept. A few months after that, we went to UberConf in Denver. That was Laine’s first IT conference, and we had a blast. That’s a pretty good “God does stuff everywhere” story, which we should probably tell at some point…
After that conference, as we adjusted back to normal life, we talked about how seriously amazingly cool it would be to give nerd presentations at a nerd conference of that level – national, and with nerd-famous people like Mark Richards and Neal Ford. Josh definitely fanboy’d when Mark Richards included him in a demo in a presentation. We also befriended one of the speakers on the tour, who lives nowhere near us. We filed away the plan to some day speak at national nerd conferences in general, and at UberConf specifically, in the “haha, sure, that might happen some day” file.
We called this a goal, but…it was a dream. It was a dream in the way that little kids gleefully dream about being an astronaut when they grow up.
Laine was off work for 6 months. Again, another story for another time. But while she was off work, we started to apply to speak at conferences. Josh’s new job was friendly to the idea, Laine had no job, it was something to think about, so…we sort of figured why not.
We applied to speak at O’Reilly’s Open Source & Software Convention (OSCON), who was having a themed Inner Source day this year. Once Laine understood what on Earth “inner source” meant, we were sort of like, “hey it is us and one of the things we love the most!!” We submitted two talks.
We also started conversations about getting onto a No Fluff Just Stuff stop, semi-local – NFJS organizes UberConf along with a lot of other regional conferences, all throughout the year. The other major conference they organize is ArchConf, in December – which was also on our Nerd/Astronaut Dreams Bucket List.
And then, on a Friday afternoon, we found out the following:
- One of our talks was accepted for OSCON.
- One of the speakers for UberConf had to drop out, there were some spots open, and we could have them if we wanted.
- We were officially in for also Tech Leader Summit and ArchConf.
God does weird, wonderful, lavish, unexpectedly awesome stuff.
…you mentioned a hiatus?
Yes! We did.
OSCON and UberConf are the same week, the week of July 15th. We got lucky (jklol pretty sure it was God doing more awesome stuff) and our talk at OSCON is that Tuesday, and our talks (4!!) at UberConf are Wednesday and Friday. So…we decided to do both conferences.
J: Should we do both?
L: Are we really crazy enough to try that? :thinking:
Us: Yep!!
We’re getting ready for those talks now. We are both extremely dedicated, prolific workers, but even we have limits. We have several posts in varying stages of done, but the kinds of thing we write require focus and attention and time and soul – and we pretty much only know how to make any content we produce in that same way.
“A man’s got to know his limitations.” – Harry Callahan, Magnum Force
We will be back. We have so many thoughts and feels and did we mention we love this blog?
Logistics
These are the descriptions and scheduling of our talks:
Please come say hello if you’ll be at either OSCON or UberConf. (If you are not attending and would like to, we have discount codes!) We love these topics, we love talking about them, and we are so stupid excited to be doing this.
Also, we will have stickers. We bought binders for them and everything.