Posted by Meagan Fisher on July 9th, 2008
Last night Jason and I attended the first ever assemblage of the members of the Build Guild. As a meeting of the smartest, sexiest, and most semantically correct that Salem has to offer, it was a huge success.
Having the Build Guild exactly one week after our epic move to Salem was - like everything in this town - perfect for us. It was almost as though co-founders Marc Amos and Angelo Simeoni said “hey, these two kids are moving to a new town where they’re total strangers to everyone, let’s find a way to gather up all the awesome people they’d want to be friends with in one place.” Of course that wasn’t the case, since before last night we were strangers to both Marc and Angelo as well.
These fine gents actually created Build Guild to bring all the local web geeks into one place, and apparently there are a ton of us. So many, in fact, that we couldn’t all fit. It’s great to know there’s so many like-minded people here in this town of witches and sailors, and just makes me all the more thrilled to be here.
For more information, be sure to check out the following:
Thanks again to Marc and Angelo, I can’t wait for the next one!
Posted by Meagan Fisher on March 27th, 2008
Gregg Pollack, Director of BarCamp Orlando, got in touch with me to put together some flyers and a poster for the event.
This poster went up in different bars and venues in downtown Orlando, where the event was held.
This year’s event lasted two days, so I also created a double-sided flyer. One side featured the information for media day, the other showed tech day.
Posted by Meagan Fisher on February 10th, 2008
Acts_as_conference was held in Orlando, FL on February 8th and 9th. Hosted by Rails For All, the conference brought all the regional rails developers together (and some out of towners!) for two days of talk, drink, and general merriment.
So I wish I could say more about the conference in general, but unfortunately I missed several of the talks because I slept in was so busy working. I was there for the always delightful Dan Benjamin’s talk about keeping things simple, and the value of design, and the superbowl (?). A non-technical talk about how important designers are? It was music to my ears.
After the first day of the conference Bradley Taylor of Rails Machine got me to do something I avoided at all costs during college; I went to the Orlando Ale House. I pretty much hate bars, but it turned out to be an awesome evening. Bradley gave out some awesome prizes; I won the “cyber-punk” novel Spook Country by William Golding. I don’t know what this “cyber-punk” genre is supposed to entail, but literally a dozen people came up to me at the event and swore that it was brilliant. In addition to new reading material, the night offered up a lot of great conversation and excellent spinach dip. I got to meet a lot of people who I’ve known and admired for some time, like Desi McAdams ofDevchix (note: Desi was pretty much the only other female at this event), author and CTO of Hashrocket Obie Fernandez, and bad-ass developer Jessie Newland. Of course all my old buddies were there, like Gregg and Jason. (How many times in a night can you hear “Hey, it’s DJ Ango!” before it starts to feel ridiculous?)
East Coast, Represent
I think the entire technical community here in Orlando was grateful to Rails For All for hosting a tech conference out here on the east coast (and south of the Mason-Dixon!) Could Florida be the new hot spot for conferences in the future? We’ve got BarCamps and FOWA’s already, who knows, maybe An Event Apart is next?
