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Personal reminiscences warning: One of the weird things about my digg experiences was where I sat in the conference hierarchy. Kevin would go to London (FOWA),

by ojbyrne 18y ago

Personal reminiscences warning: One of the weird things about my digg experiences was where I sat in the conference hierarchy. Kevin would go to London (FOWA), Paris (LeWeb), etc, and listen to a bunch of other fake people talk about fake stuff. They sent me to 2 conferences. Webmasterworld in Las Vegas, which was all SEO, lots of hustlers, the best party I've ever been to (a Yahoo party in the Hugh Hefner suite at the Palms), met Matt Cutts; and then they sent me to Reflection/Projections in Urbana-Champaign (why would we want to go there?) - which included Steve Yegge and Randall Monroe (XKCD), and was probably the best conference I've ever been to. You pose, poseurs gather around you. You get pushed into the background, you meet lots of interesting people.

unalone 18y ago
I'm guessing you don't have the fondest recollections of the Digg team? (Not trying to be snarky: I just don't recall ever reading you talk directly about Digg before.)
- ojbyrne 18y ago
  I have good memories of most of the people I worked with there (in fact engineer no. 2 now works for me). The 2 people at the top I have zero respect for.
  - jgrahamc 18y ago
    You just went up in my opinion by a large amount.
petercooper 18y ago
You're right. Webmasterworld's Pubcons are awesome. I'm a writer, a programmer, whatever, but the energy of the people in the SEO and marketing world is contagious and they put on excellent events. Any grandstanding is all in good fun unlike when you get a bunch of passive aggressive programmers together.
amohr 18y ago
Reflections/Projections is consistently a good time. The year before that one, I saw Yale Patt, the guys from Rooster Teeth (Red vs. Blue), Max Levchin, Jawed Kareem, and Joel Spolsky - that was a pretty exciting weekend. And there's a job fair one day so there's all sorts of recruiters, which means all sorts of free food/drink!

by ojbyrne 18y ago

unalone 18y ago

I'm guessing you don't have the fondest recollections of the Digg team? (Not trying to be snarky: I just don't recall ever reading you talk directly about Digg before.)

ojbyrne 18y ago
I have good memories of most of the people I worked with there (in fact engineer no. 2 now works for me). The 2 people at the top I have zero respect for.
- jgrahamc 18y ago
  You just went up in my opinion by a large amount.

petercooper 18y ago

You're right. Webmasterworld's Pubcons are awesome. I'm a writer, a programmer, whatever, but the energy of the people in the SEO and marketing world is contagious and they put on excellent events. Any grandstanding is all in good fun unlike when you get a bunch of passive aggressive programmers together.

amohr 18y ago

Reflections/Projections is consistently a good time. The year before that one, I saw Yale Patt, the guys from Rooster Teeth (Red vs. Blue), Max Levchin, Jawed Kareem, and Joel Spolsky - that was a pretty exciting weekend. And there's a job fair one day so there's all sorts of recruiters, which means all sorts of free food/drink!