DConf 2013 - what a show!

[Jonathan M Davis]

On Saturday, May 04, 2013 01:11:26 Walter Bright wrote:
> I just arrived home after 4 days of little sleep and dawn to late night
> talking with fellow D-heads. And the conference was ...
> 
> 
> !!AWESOME!!
> 
> 
> .. It exceeded my highest hopes. Basically, I had a grand time, and I hope
> you guys did, too. The excitement at the conference was palpable.

It was indeed awesome and far better than I had anticipated. The talks were 
incredibly informative (sometimes even in areas that I thought that I knew 
quite well), and a lot of good discussions took place. It's amazing how 
different it can be to discuss things in person, and I think that we all 
benefited from it.

> Anyone
> needing help was deluged with offers, many hatchets got buried

One cool thing along these lines that Iain told me about was that after his 
gdc talk, someone came up to him and just offered him a mac mini that they'd 
had lying around! He didn't ask any money for it. He just asked for Iain to 
make gdc awesome. Iain was blown away by that.

We've got a great community with a lot of enthusiasm, and with plenty of 
people willing to donate time and money (as was shown with kickstarter). We 
could always use more help, but who and what we have is great.

> (amazing how
> meeting the real person behind an online persona does that!)

Yeah. It was very weird to meet a lot of the people around here in person. Now 
I have faces (and voices!) to go with many of the posts around here. It makes 
a surprisingly large difference. In some cases, now I can even hear how some of 
the posters would say what they wrote in their own voice and accent. That 
alone is going to have a large impact on me.

As an interesting side note, I thought that it was interesting that people who 
used the web forum did a better job of recognizing people thanks to the 
gravatars. I use the mailing list, so I don't generally see that, and a lot of 
people recognized me whereas I recognized very few people.

> We'll definitely be doing one next year, so start roughing out your
> presentations now!

I'm definitely looking forward to it. It was a blast this time around, and I 
can't wait for the next one.

- Jonathan M Davis