My LessConf Wrapup

Last weekend I was at LessConf in Atlanta. It was a great conference. The speakers were good, but even better, the organizers Allan and Steve really let their personalities shine through and permeate the entire conference. If you think having the public WiFi network named “Steve’s Taint” is inappropriate and unprofessional, this probably isn’t the conference for you.

Now is the time to gloat about all the awesome people I met.

I had breakfast with Allan and his son on the last day. The kid was a hilarious little dude. He loves bacon more than any internet fad.

I had met Allan last year at the Front End Design Conference, were I also met John Ashenden, the lead designer for Grooveshark. I caught up briefly with John again, which was awesome. I now know secret awesome things about Grooveshark.

I met Giovanni and Julia from Unmatched Style. They are both super interesting people and we had a lot of fun together. They are also putting together the ConvergeSE conference, which I hope to make it down to.

I met Nick and Jim from DOCTYPE. I had met them a few months ago at BarCamp Orlando, and it was nice to see them again. They are little weblebrities already (inside joke). They also just started at Carsonified doing stuff for their new video membership thing. Huge props. Jim proved his is way smarter than me by learning how to play Craps in like 2 minutes where it took me like 2 hours.

I caught up with Jon and Nate from FortySevenMedia. I had met them last year at Front End Design Conference as well. This year they were pimping their new site Designer’s Music. I got to be helpful and let them know the amazon widgets they were using could be created dynamically from search terms rather than individually created.

I met Danny Outlaw from the Outlaw Design Blog. Danny is doing freelance WordPress design work and staying busy. He lived in Costa Rica for a year, and I’ll be going there soon, so I gotta hit him up for some sweet stuff to do.

I briefly met Cameron Moll as he was shooting out to catch a plane. I thanked him for helping fill my vacant spot at Chatman Design with our posting at Authentic Jobs.

I met Jason Beaird, who is now working for MailChimp. MailChimp was there in force. I even got an awesome knitted MailChimp HAT! Jason told me when I meet people at these things I should introduce myself as the guy from CSS-Tricks, which he’s probably right about, but just feels weird.

I met Kimberly from Regator (human curated blog directory) and shamelessly emailed her and told her CSS-Tricks should obviously be included in the web design section.

I met Brandon Mathis who gave me a personal demonstration of Compass/Sass and helped me get it going on my own machine. It’s pretty cool, and I look forward to playing with it more and hopefully doing a screencast demo of it for CSS-Tricks.

I ran into Andrew Maier who is from Atlanta, an alum of Georgia Tech, and part of the UX Booth crew (who was a sponsor of the event). Also there from UX Booth was Matthew Kammerer who also works part time for BuySellAds.

Kevin Hale from Wufoo came up and gave me a special present I’ll be sharing soon.

If I missed anybody I’m sorry =( I waited too long to write this.