Well, I'm on the flight back home (well, on a flight to Charlotte to get to the flight home). I've finally been to my first Lotusphere, and it was one hell of an experience! It's everything that's ever been said about it, and then some probably. I think my brain melted by Tuesday...I was making it through all of the sessions fine, I guess but once the structure of the sessions was over, I don't think I was handling it well. I'm not the most extroverted guy out there but the overwhelming scale of what's going on at Lotusphere combined with my being there on my own made me crawl back into my shell more than I expected to.
When I went to the BOF105 session, "The IBM Lotus Blogging Community" I actually felt pretty welcomed by the collection of established bloggers that I intentionally sat among. There was a comment at one point how the Domino blogging circle is a bit of a closed circle. I didn't really find that to be true. It is hard to feel like part of a group when it seems that everyone knows each other and you don't know anyone. But when you're right there in the middle of things, everyone's really nice and welcoming. Especially CD Exchange he came up with was a success as far as I can tell. It took some time to get it together but I gave away a bunch of CDs and got one from John and Pete Brown. There'll be another entry on their discs once I get a chance to get through them.
If you're looking for the info on my CD, it's on the entry from 22 Jan, 2006.
The JAMfests were really cool even if I didn't get around to getting up there and singing anything.
It's going to take me a while to go through and absorb everything I learned in the sessions at Lotuspere. I really think that some of the sessions had the content to make me a better Domino administrator, which was what I was hoping for. Genuine detailed technical content all over the place. The Best Practices sessions (thanks Rocky) were really good. The Infrastructure Design sessions were fantastic too, and those were most of what I hit.
I'm excited about the future of Domino as a platform more by being exposed to the people that are creating its future, than by the normal route via the marketeers. I'm ready to get back to work and fix some stuff and maybe try to do some innovating myself (while I don't talk about where I work on the blog, my employer doesn't tend to take well to change).
It was great meeting all of the people I got to meet and chat with while I was there (I'm horrible with names/faces, so I may need to be reminded of some of y'all if you make it to my lil blog. Will try to make it back next year and hopefully will be able to meet some more of you and maybe make myself a little more sociable than I was this year.
Beautiful Disgrace from the album "Punk Statik Paranoia" by Orgy
Technorati Tags: Lotusphere2006, Travel
