Quick Thoughts on Defrag
Let me preface this post by saying that I am not a “conference person”.
My first couple of salaried jobs were organizing national conferences. There is a certain conference euphoria that tends to surround these events. Now I typically avoid conferences and their bubbles.
I say that to express that I do not take the decision to attend a conference lightly. Especially when it costs me a few thousand dollars. (Yes I do enjoy presenting and participating on panels. Yes I see that as a contradiction.)
So why did I decide to come to Defrag this year? Two reasons:
- The topics are highly relevant to what I am doing with Bizen. (Big data, analytics, business intelligence, social media, semantic web, etc)
- There is no bull shit
As you might be able to guess, #2 is the bigger deciding factor for me. How did I know that before attending? I attended Gluecon (organized by the same team) as a presenter.
I went to Defrag to learn. I wanted to learn from people who know way more about my areas of expertise than I do.
What I found is that the presenters are not only ridiculously smart and insightful, they are also really good an displaying and sharing information. It is like a firehose of big ideas straight into my brain. Like, really big ideas.
It is going to take me a while to process all of this information, and I know that what I have heard at Defrag this week will influence my ideas for the next couple of years. I didn’t gain new customers for Bizen (though I did meet someone who was already following the progress). I didn’t meet a ton of people; that is not why I was here.
Nice work Kim and Eric Norlin!
