C4: It's All Hallway

Whew, C4[0] is over.

No one died, though Colin Barrett and I came close. But that’s another story (or two).

There were snags, but the big tickets pretty much flowed. The feedback has been overwhelmingly on the positive side.

Some folks accused me to trying to out-WWDC WWDC. OK, I’ll concede the Jamba Juice was a direct shot across the bow (developers have been sore about Jamba Juice ever since Apple stopped distributing them at WWDC a few years ago (which is yet another story)), but in terms of the food being much better: come on, it’s just hard not to out-do WWDC on that point. We shan’t discuss WWDC’s “pizza”.

There’s a lot of stories, but they’re all jamming up in my head to come out, so I’ll just relate one from the very tail-end:

Winding up the adventure over lunch at Adler, we were talking about the size of the conference. Should the next one be bigger? Olof Hellman (who semi-live-blogged C4 for MacBU) wanted to keep it on the smaller side, pointing out an interesting observation: there wasn’t a hallway scene.

In most conferences, some folks will congregate in the hallways to hang out. Indeed, some have asked me if I attend any sessions at all at WWDC since I seem to always be out on one of the main levels chatting with folks.

The reasoning is simple: I often get more out of connecting with individuals than listening to a session.

But with C4, I didn’t catch any conversations in the hallway. Olof said “The main room was the hallway. It was all hallway.”

Cool.

Thanks to everyone for making it a success: Tim Allison for helping with set-up+tear-down and handling registration. Mike Valle and Liz Pomroy for handling the unsorted tshirt bundles and being willing gophers. Russ Conte for his enthusiastic AV. Bob Frank for ideas and manning the camera. Duncan for his awesome photography work. The speakers: Gruber, Simmons, Hillegass, Mueller, Dekorte, Fitzpatrick and DB. Honorary shout-out to Kafasis for being on the panel but not introduced.

And, of course, the attendees. C4 couldn’t have happened without your vote of confidence.

Thanks!

Tuesday, October 24, 2006
06:33 PM