ConvergeSE Wrap-Up

ConvergeSE is a shining example of what happens when people love what they do and love their customers. The communication from the staff was constant and helpful, the speakers “brought it” and the sponsors were great companies that helped make it all possible.

Amenities

They had all of the things that you need throughout the day, so there was no need to leave (even for lunch), but you had plenty of time to do so if you wanted to. Breakfast items, coffee, lunch and snacks were all in great supply throughout the day.

Style

The styling of the information available is very unique. I know unique gets thrown around a lot, but this truly is. They change it every year, using a different aesthetic to deliver the same messages. A good portion (or all) of the artwork that is used in the materials is done by Giovanni.

Day One: Workshops

Friday was workshop day, where they had four tracks running with each track featuring a workshop of 1 hour, 45 minutes. You could sign up in advance for them to guarantee your spot, but there was flexibility to move around if you hadn’t registered or wanted to change.

Kevin Hale of Wufoo

The day started with an introduction from Gene and an inspiring keynote from Kevin Hale, of Wufoo. He waxed poetic on the history of why we (as tradespeople) get together to share information about our craft. If you have never read up on it, I’d suggest taking a peek at the history of the guild.

After the keynote, we broke out into our workshops. It was really tough to make the decision as to which one to attend. You can see the full schedule, but I’ll share info about the ones that I attended.

Alan Johnson

Alan Johnson – What the heck is HTTP and how do you use APIs

I primarily work in markup, so I chose to extend my knowledge about how all of this stuff connects and what happens with it. Alan took what was a very dry subject and gave it life. He was very pumped about sharing and his love for dev work even made telnet interesting. I learned a good deal about the principles behind http and how to build a small API. It actually was less intimadating than it seems. I truly enjoyed the talk and was only slightly jealous over the slew of tweets coming out about the others.

Trent Walton

Reagan Ray

Dave Rupert

Trent Walton, Reagan Ray and Dave Rupert – Designing with Web Type

I was planning on rolling hard through the dev track all day, but Chris Coyier reminded me that it was the Paravel crew doing the web type workshop. He had me at Paravel. Unsuprisingly, it was standing room only and I was happy to stand in order to enjoy the workshop. These guys are hilarious! On their site, they are depicted as the three amigos and it is so true. They are a perfectly blended unit of mixed talent that do wonderful things while being entertaining along the way. They shared great info (and code) about using and designing with web type. I laughed and learned throughout the whole thing.

Lunch

ConvergeSE is different than most of the other conferences I have been to, in that they provide lunch. While I love finding a group to get together with to head out to lunch, it is really cool to also bounce around and find people to talk to throughout the time.

Aaron Quinn

Bob Galmarini

Aaron Quinn & Bob Galmarini – Building a Strong Foundation

These guys are from {e} House Studio and they provided some great information about their process behind handling sizable projects. Their take on the content matrix was really interesting and I think that it would be great to apply to every site. There is more info on the process, but the general principle is a grid of all of the pages with: their purpose, call to action, where they lead and where they will get the content for it. They also talked a lot about grey boxing, which is how they approach the original layout and designs. This part got a little weird because some attendees couldn’t get past the terminology. We ended up discussing why it wasn’t just called “high fidelity wireframing”, which unfortunately cost us some time in learning more about the results. I’m sharing this only because I hope that future attendees of any workshop won’t initiate semantic arguments during a workshop. This wasn’t about a name, it was about educating clients and an excellent process that avoids costly revision time. It was fantastic and something I will be learning more about and implementing on my own.

JD Graffam

JD Graffam – Simple Focus

I had originally planned on checking out Node.js, but I got to talking during the break and was late. I didn’t want to interrupt as they were actually coding, so I wandered over to the Simple Focus workshop. JD was awesome to step up and take a workshop on short notice, as the original person planned stepped out over the weekend. The workshop was based on both the title and his company name and delivered some great information on the “mobile first” line of thinking. He gave some great information about getting into the mindset of the users and delivering content that would be useful to them while they are on their devices. It sparked off into some great conversation amongst the attendees, sharing experience and knowledge.

Day One After Party

I didn’t go to the after party on day one because I had family with me on the trip and wanted to get back to the lake house to enjoy their company. However, from the looks of people in the morning on Day 2, good times were had!

Day Two – Conference Day

Gene got us kicked back off for Day 2 and reminded us that they would be running a tight ship on times throughout the day. The whole crew did a great job of keeping things on track while still being completely friendly and low-key.

Carl Smith

Carl Smith – It’s a matter of trust

Wow. I had plenty of coffee by the start of the day, but for anyone that hadn’t, Carl woke everyone right up! He is full of energy, a completely natural speaker and delivered honest and humorous information about trust. His talk was full of great information about the relationship that you form with your customers and when it begins in regards to your web presence. He used fantastic examples and some of his real-life experiences as a customer to drive home the points. If Carl is speaking somewhere, go see him.

Trent Walton

Trent Walton – Controlling Web Typography

Everything I knew about Trent Walton was wrong. Ok, not everything, but one thing for sure. While he produces amazing typography-driven designs, this is a new craft for him. He took interest in typography on the web with the recent explosion of web fonts. This was an awesome surprise and a good reminder of what we can all do if we dive in to learning something, start producing things and share them with the community. He gave an excellent talk on how to use and control web fonts, some services and solutions out there to help you use them right now and some things to dive into to help get the browser makers supporting them. All this was delivered in his very humble manner of speaking, while showing how his amigos make his job easier. He and the Paravel guys just love the web and are striving to make it better with everything that they do.

Leslie Jensen-Inman

Leslie Jensen-Inman – Go Forth and Make Awesomeness

Powerful. If I had to use one word to describe the presentation that Leslie gave, that would be it. I have never seen tears shed at a web conference before this. They were good tears, based on understanding, appreciation and empathy. Leslie shared her passion for education and community and showed very personal examples of how she is involved with programs making a difference. This was a great reminder about the power that we all have in the community. I often get wrapped up in sharing information with those that are already in pursuit of it, while people like Leslie are using their knowledge and skill to bring new possibilities and alter the future paths with people who are less priveleged than we are. It was warm and compassionate and she also shared her goals of all of us “Making Awesome and Doing Good.” We were even challenged to talk to others throughout the day in order to exchange our duplicate buttons for one of theirs. It was fantastic!

Joshua Rosenbaum

Joshua Rosenbaum – Death of the Demo, Rise of the Branded Tutorial

Joshua was MailChimp personified. Everything you imagine about how awesome that company is came to life on the stage. It started with whinging swag out to the crowd and then he dove into entertaining and educating us for the rest of the time. He and the MailChimp crew walk the walk. He comes on stage to educate us, but does it in an entertaining way that makes everyone burst into laughter and instantly share everything they can about the experience with anyone listening on The Twitter or The Social Networks. It was an awesome presentation on how to do exactly what he was doing, like a talk within a talk.

John Coates

John Coates – Phone – The Forgotten Channel

John was another shining example of a walking represenation of a company. He is Freshbooks in my mind and he shared their values of communicating with customers. It was a great reminder to use all available options of communication, including the telephone. It’s an important takeaway to know that the first major purchase in the basement that Freshbooks got started in was a telephone system. This is a company that we all hold in high regard for their service, support and outreach in the community. They put great emphasis on the phone as a communication channel for a web app, so we should all be giving it more thought.

Chris Heilmann

Chris Heilmann – HTML5 For All

Chris hails from Mozilla and gave an awesome look into the state of HTML5 and related technologies. He was absolutely hilarious and informative, while sharing some of the amazing things that can be done with the latest tech. Then, he challenged us to go out and do the same thing. It was awesome, too, in that he emphasized building for all of the browsers.

Chris Coyier

Chris Coyier – CSS Pseudo Elements for Fun and Profit!

I was especially excited for Chris’ talk because it gave me a sneak preview of what we’ll get to see at the Front-End Design Conference this year. Chris is a natural speaker and sharer of good things. He has an amazing amount of passion for CSS and drilled down on the power of pseudo elements, primarily :before and :after. It was excellent info and completely entertaining, everything you would expect from Chris!

Nick Pettit

Jim Hoskins

Nick Petit & Jim Hoskins – Creating a Community

This was a great talk on the story behind how Nick and Jim became on overnight success (6 years in the making). I’ve been fortunate enough to know these guys throughout the second half of their friendship and they are great people. It was awesome that they sat back and gave pointers on how to build a community and successfully grow a community, while including their real-life experience with it. I have always respected the fact that they dove into doing what they love and shared it, which ultimately lead to their current roles with Carsonified and Think Vitamin Membership (Soon to be Treehouse).

Ethan Marcotte

Ethan Marcotte – Responsive Web Design

This is another talk I was extra pumped for, as Ethan will be sharing Responsive Web Design with the #frontendconf folks as well. I have been stalking, er listening, to everything Ethan has to say about responsive web design since his first article about it on A List Apart. The beautiful thing about his presenations on it is that they are growing as the movement and experience is. We were lucky in that he was allowed to share the work that he is currently doing with The Boston Globe on their redesign along with teaching all of us the principles and values that he holds dear. It was truly inspring and #RWD is my new love.

Adam Hansen

Adam Hansen – An Inside Job: Turning Customers into Fans

Can Rackspace love you? No, but Adam can. He loves Rackspace and their customers and he shared insight into how the company approaches service. The point he was making with the “love” is that the company itself can’t love you, but each individual person that you talk to at the company can. One of the best takeaways was knowing that while Rackspace is a heavily tech involved company, they do not have the word “tech” in their core value. They want to be known as one of the world’s greatest service companies. With the passion that Adam has, I think that is being realized.

Noah Everett

Noah Everett – Behind the Business of Twitpic & Heello

Noah founded Twitpic and it is one of the great stories of a something taking off. He built it out of a need that he had and realized that others probably did too. (Sharing pictures in tweets). At the time, he probably underestimated the need and it quickly turned into a scenario where he was borrowing his mom’s mini-van to do trips to pick up servers. (Which he would need more of by the time that he returned.) It was a great look into how the idea took off and the major numbers of people that it is serving. He couldn’t share much about Heello, but I’d keep an eye out for whatever he kicks off.

After-Party

I was very lucky (Thank you Gene and the crew) to be able to attend a post-event get together with the crew and the speakers at an awesome little BBQ place called Doc’s. The conversations were great and it was amazing to be surrounded by so many fantastic people.

The actual After-Party was held at the Art Bar, which was a great spot with style. I got lucky and shared a beer and conversation with Carl Smith. (I almost fell over when he mentioned #frontendconf). He is truly a great, genuine person and shared some interesting things that he learned while doing his workshop and had great things to say about the event itself.

I bailed early to head out to a campsite where my family was, but I imagine that it was one hell of a party.

Final Thoughts – Thank You

I just want to thank everyone involved in running the event. I know that it is primarily headed-up the UnmatchedStyle.com crew, but there are lots of volunteers and other great folks that help make it what it is. Thank you to everyone involved.

Also, thank you to the speakers and the sponsors for caring so much about the community and giving back so much.

Events like this where I get to learn and talk with the amazing people in the web design community are always great. However, ConvergeSE is something truly special.