Now that we’ve been home a couple of days, and the house is pretty much recovered (just ignore the kitchen floor please) and some urgent pent-up client work is done, I can take a moment and jot some thoughts on the whole SXSW experience.

These are mainly for myself - so that if the opportunity comes up again next year I can look back and see what I’d do the same or differently.  These are going to be somewhat stream-of-consciousness - so just be forewarned. 

Accommodations
This is where my SXSW experience will be dramatically different than the norm.  We made the trip down as a family, folding in the conference after a visit to my parents in South Texas.  Between being more of the camping sort than hotel-staying sort, and wanting a bit of distance from party scene that goes with the conference, we booked a fully-equipped cabin at the Austin Lone Star RV Park. 

The advantage of this was largely economical - the cabin was about 1/2 the cost of a downtown hotel room.  It also allowed my family to be in more of a camping setting when I was at SXSW events - we had bikes along for the kids, there was a pool and playground, etc. 

Disadvantages?  A change in ownership between booking and visiting meant the wi-fi that was promoted as free was now an additional cost.  $15/week wasn’t bad, but the service was neither fast or reliable.  The last two nights it was totally down, and the park offered no after-hours support for it.  Also - what the park doesn’t make clear is their location, Look at their site - see that picture of people using the pool? They are swimming about 20 feet from a frontage road that runs alongside IH-35 in Austin.  The traffic on that road clips along at about 70MPH, so it wasn’t as idyllic of a setting as we had expected.  Also, the park is located right next to an adult movie theater.  They have lots of bushes and fences and all, but still - these two things meant the playground was out of bounds for our kids as it was also right next to the frontage road, on the movie theater side, and outside the campground’s main gate.

Other than that the cabin worked as well as can be expected with four bodies in a relatively small space.

Transportation
The campground ended up being about 1/4 mile from the southern terminus of the city bus line, so on the first day in town we walked to the station, bought our $1 ticket and rode downtown to register for SXSW.  This was a good experience for us, as we’re pretty typical suburban dwellers and don’t use public transportation much.  Once we had the route figured out it was a pretty easy ride, and that $1 ticket is good for 24 hours so it’s quite the deal.

After the first day, however, it was just easier to have MsBoyink drop me downtown.  The bus ride was at least 30 minutes, and she could get me there in half that.  She and the kids would then go on to do other things around Austin - visiting local parks, etc.

I did have one night where it was too late to get her (and the kids) to come get me, so I gave in and got a cab back to the campground.  At $22, it was a one-time experience.  The driver acted like he didn’t have the right change so I kinda felt like he was trying to get a $8 tip out of the deal.  Sorry bud, you just met a Dutchman…

All in all accommodations and transportation were good for us - but in the future I’d really like to be right downtown.  Not that I need to be that close to all the action, but less time between deciding to call it a night and actually putting my head to a pillow would be nice.  It’d also be nice to have a spot for during the day downtimes - so I could grab a nap or shower.  I’m just not sure how busy/noisy the hotels are with all the other SXSW attendees.

Registering
We got to the convention center around 10:00, and there was no waiting to register.  The whole process was very efficient and I have to commend both the volunteers and whoever organizes them.  They did seem amused by the fact that we came in as a family - I guess that was a bit of a novelty.

EllisLab Events
Meeting and hanging out with the EL folks was really my primary goal for the trip.  We started Friday night with supper where most of the “meeting face to face for the first time” stuff took place.  This virtual world is interesting - on the one hand with blogs, email, forums and IM I felt like I knew them but nothing can replace actually meeting in person.  According to Rick I “looked like my picture only taller”....  After supper I left them to fine-tune the presentation for the next day. 

Saturday was a long one - while not directly involved in the presentation or open panel I tried to help out where I could.  I took a bunch of pics with Rick’s camera (hope some of them turned out), manned the room lights, tweaked the sound board, ran the mic around to people wanting to ask questions, and talked to people.  It was really nice to meet a continual stream of EE users, and have so many people mention the tutorials.  Thanks again folks - your comments are most gratifying.

Saturday night was the EllisLab party.  I had my family show up a bit early as I wanted them to meet the EllisLab folks as well before things got too busy.  After about an hour things were too busy so after getting some food down they returned to the cabin.  I stuck around for the rest of the EL party, then continued on to the Solspace event.  Along the way we were the attempted targets of some egg-throwers, and after getting to the bar we learned that they had successfully nailed Rick Ellis. One of those moments where having no hair and a leather coat came in handy. 

I was pretty whipped by this point - so didn’t move around much at this event. I did however have some good conversations with some local EE guys - crazy to drive so far to do, but there you go.

Sunday was the EL brunch, then we took in the trade show, and then had some lunch downtown.  It was mid afternoon by this point so the group was going to break up for a few hours before supper.  The planned supper conflicted with my plans for the http://sxsw.geekslovebowling.com/ event later that evening, so we said our goodbyes on the sidewalk and I returned to the convention center for a bit of catching up on email and feeding the introvert side of me.  I know there were panels I could have attended but I just needed some down time.

Photos of the EL events can be found on Flickr in both this group and this one - with more coming as there was a photographer hired to cover the party.

Bowling
Nathan Smith of http://sonspring.com/ and http://www.godbit.com had invited me to be on his bowling team.  I didn’t know in advance what a big deal this event was - but soon after I joined Nathan’s team the event filled up with 52 teams.  On the bus ride to the bowling alley I ended up sitting next Alex of http://nclud.com/about/ - one of the organizers of the event.

The bowling alley was just chaos.  They were running out of shoes - although I was lucky to get a pair about 1.5 sizes too big.  Lots of folks ended up bowling in socks.  I hadn’t eaten because I had heard there would be food there - but I never was able to get any.  The bag of peanuts in my backpack saved the day.

The teams were organized alphabetically - and we were team “404 - team not found” which is cool on the website but meant that we were left-most in the alley with the wall on one side.  Overall it felt like we were a bit isolated back there - and while bowling itself was fun between our location and the business of bowling I didn’t get quite the experience I was hoping for.  If I return next year I’ll just go as a spectator so I can be a bit freer to mingle.  I rolled a 142 on the first game - not bad - but the second I think was a 110.  Not great - but with ill fitting shoes and balls about what you could expect.

Overall I was surprised at just how, well, just plain sloppy drunk people will get at events like this.  Don’t get me wrong - I like beer and all, but there’s just no way I’d drink that much in a more professional setting around people I really don’t know.  Sitting in the bus waiting to go back downtown I was talking with a guy across the isle - asking him where he worked and what he did. He was an OS programmer for Apple and I thought he had a bit of an accent.  Then he got up to talk to someone further back in the bus, and I realized it wasn’t an accent - he was so tipsy he was slurring his words.  And then he stumbled into me, having to brace himself against my shoulder to avoid completely falling in my lap.  After righting himself he walked away without so much as an “I’m sorry” or “pardon me”.  After that episode I just have a slightly different view of Apple, and would hate it if I ever did something similar and caused someone to have a poorer perception of either Boyink Interactive or EllisLab.

The Other Sessions
By this point it was Monday, and I finally had the chance to take in a couple of the other sessions.  One had Guy Kawasaki moderating, and his intent of being more “entertaining than informative” was certainly met. It was an hour filled with lots of laughs, but if I were building a social network of any sort I’m not sure I would have walked out with any actionable advice.

I was really surprised at the amount of expletives coming from the panel members - maybe I’m a bit sheltered living here in W. MI, but I don’t hear people talking like that in the conversations I have on a day in and day out basis, and frankly I thought it made them sound like a preteenager trying to come off as older and more experienced.

The other panel I went to was DesignEye for SouthBy, where a group of some of the industry’s best talent take on a site and improve it.  This one disappointed me a bit in that they decided to focus more on the outcome rather than the process.  For me, I knew this group could produce some really great-looking stuff.  I was more interested in learning how they got there, and what possible methodologies they used that I could incorporate into my work.

When the Q&A period degenerated into questions like “Why did you use such a big blue banner” it was time to go.  It was starting to sound too much like the post EE 2.0 comments for me—too many people worried about the color scheme rather than focusing on the functionality and architecture.

Godbit Dinner
The other main reason I had for attending SXSW was meeting some of the folks from the http://www.godbit.com site.  Monday night there was a dinner scheduled and it was a great time—meeting some familiar faces and some guys I hadn’t before.  My family came down for this one as well - and I won a prize for driving the furthest.  Lots of good conversation, and we shut the event down.  I left feeling like maybe there is hope yet for the Church online - I think this group has the talent to really change the world.

The End
The Godbit dinner was the last SXSW event I attended.  Tuesday the weather looked nice, so I took the family to San Antonio for a visit to the Alamo and the Riverwalk.  After a long afternoon of playing tourist we returned to the cabin and started to pack for the return trip.  Neither MsBoyink or I could sleep very well, so at 3:30AM we got up and started prepping the van.  At 4:30 we loaded the kids in and started the two-day journey home.

I’m still in recovery/analysis of the whole experience but overall it was really good.  I got to meet a bunch of people I’ve been interacting online on a daily basis with.  I was surprised at how, out of all the conversations I had, only 2 people had never heard of ExpressionEngine and how many of the people who had heard of it had either used it for a project or were evaluating it.  For a product that has never really been actively advertised that kind of mindshare with it’s target audience is pretty amazing.

I’m not much for the party scene, my session experience was a bit iffy, and much of the conference seems like an ego game—so I’m not sure I’d attend SXSW again without any more specific activities or goals.  But if EllisLab, other work partners or clients are planning more specific events I’d definitely go again.  It was nice having the family there, but I think next time I’d either go alone or just with MsBoyink so I could be in work-mode more without feeling like I also had to be in family-mode.

And - I’d fly.