OOW and J1 2015

I should have planned ahead for a week hiatus here, and this week will be a short one for me too.  Clarification on my original commitment - I'm writing every work day.  Vacation is vacation.  And sometimes working an event like this doesn't allow for any down time to just write.  

Last week we held the two big conferences my company sponsors, Oracle Open World and JavaOne.  I'm pretty sure this was my 8th J1 and 5th OOW.  We did a bunch of community stuff, including a dinner with our "gurus" - the people with the highest leaderboard ranking on the site.  All men, of course.  It went really well.  We got to share with them our plan for the next year, and got some great feedback about what their current pain points are.  

We also did a "quest" where they could do a bunch of different activities around the community site and each time they completed an activity they were entered in a drawing for a prize.  This year went much better than what we did last year.  

And I didn't have to touch a single t-shirt.  That, in and of itself, was a beautiful thing. 

These conferences are always a struggle for me.  I think being an extreme introvert (who likes people) is he perfect personality type for what I do every day.  I'm alone in a room communicating with my peers and my community via email and phone.  Seeing them all in person is fantastic, but it is exhausting by day two, with no room to recover for a solid week.