Yesterday, I took the day off of work to attend Stir Trek. I'd been hearing about it for quite awhile, as Jeff has been quite excited about it and talked about it quite often throughout its planning stages. After two months of planning, the event finally happened!

I arrived in Columbus Thursday night, just in time to catch the tail end of their geek dinner. It was good to finally meet Rachel Appel, and I also enjoyed seeing all of my friends who were there. I apparently had good timing, as some of the guys who were there wanted to play Zombie Fluxx (in the food court?!?) and I happened to have my set on me. It was good to see the gang before the event, as the day of the event would be quite busy!

Friday morning, I was up bright and early to help transport supplies to the theater. Once we had our caravan of vehicles unloaded, I joined the registration team and helped them with setup.





Carey Payette and Jody A. Morgan took over leading the registration team. These two ran a great operation on getting people their bags, their tickets, their nametags, their shirts, and everything else needed for registration. I worked with Lilyn Chang and Brian Moore on getting tickets and bags to those waiting to register.



After people registered, they were sent down the hall, where they could get something to eat for breakfast. Brian Sherwin did an excellent job of setting up the breakfast, including the artistic arrangement of the fruit.



There were two tracks for this event:





There were many topics covered between the 2 tracks. Special thanks to the speakers who came out and shared their knowledge on the topics covered, in no particular order:

• Tim Heuer - What's New in Silverlight 3 and .NET RIA Services


• Steve Smith - ASP.NET 4.0


• Rachel Appel - Choosing Between MVC and ASP.NET Web Forms


• Matt Casto - Building Silverlight Controls


• Phil Japikse - Overview of jQuery


• Michael Eaton - What's New in WPF 4


• Jeff Blankenburg - IE8, SuperPreview, and the Web Platform Installer


• Tim Hibner - SketchFlow


• Brian Prince - Cloud Computing with Azure

Thanks to our sponsors for helping make it happen:






And thanks to the attendees who came out for this amazing event. I saw many people from Cleveland, and I'm glad they came out. There were over 300 attendees at the event that came from all over - Washington, Missouri, Kentucky, and Michigan, to name a few places.

Thanks to the volunteers who helped the organizers with the event. And most of all, thanks to the organizers - Jeff Blankenburg, Matt Casto, Tim Hibner, and Carey Payette - for bringing this event to Columbus (and not Detroit for once!).

I took a lot more pictures than the ones included in this post. You can see my pictures in my Stir Trek set on Flickr.

Looking forward to next year's event - something along the lines of Iron Man 2... hmm....

Labels: Stir Trek