I enjoy Øredev, and the big wooshing sound it makes as it goes by.
This week was Øredev week, and now I sit here late on the Friday evening, feeling that familiar combination of being mentally wrung out and at the same time energized and thinking I could have squeezed even more into the experience.
It is probably a good thing that I did not, because I am tired enough as is. Tired enough that I have re-realized that it is, in fact, Friday, and that I have a whole weekend to rest and recover before diving back into work and other things.
This year, I did on-stage interviews with all keynote speakers right after their respective keynotes. With six keynotes spread unevenly across two and a half conference days, I had plenty of time for other things on paper. But I decided to try and give as much attention as I could to preparing and performing the keynote interviews well, and so I made sure to not schedule many regular recordings. In the end, I did two non-keynote recordings and had one keynote interview cancelled for a grand total of seven. Looking at the archives, it seems I usually get around eight recordings done, so I gave myself a normal balance in the end.
But, again, there is always more which would have been fun to build on. Quick chats with speakers which revealed that we could have had a great recording if we had carved out a time. Even in my currens state, I could write down a list of eight such possibilities to follow up on without making much of an effort at all.
All of which is to say that conferences are still fantastic things, meeting and talking to new combinations of people in new settings is a fantastic way to make new connections and come up with new ideas. And all this value without even starting on the long list of interesting talks I would like to watch once the videos land on Youtube.
I thought of a few more possible threads while writing this. Decompression of all the concentrated information I absorbed during the week has only begun.