SXSW Day Three (and onwards)

I’ve been back a couple of days now, so of course people have asked how it was, and my response has been ‘Amazing‘. I really do mean that, the entire week was great. It was a fantastic holiday, full of interesting panels, great people, delicious food and excellent parties. I’ve already started hustling friends into coming next year.

My original plan was to make a blog post once a day, which fell by the way side pretty quickly, after two days infact. It turns out SXSW is really quite a lot of fun, and theres not the time for blogging or uploading photos to flickr. I didn’t take long to realise SXSW is as much about parties as it is panels.

In my book this is a good thing, a great thing. A lot of the ideas being discussd in panels aren’t new to me, topics I already know well or could learn somewhere else. There are a lots of great UK conferences, there are community events, there are lots of blog posts, articles and tutorials online that can help with this. So I made a point of going to the more obscure panels I knew little about and the social side of things.

I’m a little glad that the trip was mostly self funded, i’d feel kind of bad if work had funded the whole thing as I missed quite a few panels due to hangovers. It’s not that i’ve come away without learning anything, just that a lot of what I learnt wasn’t directly related to my day-to-day job.

A very brief round up of what I enjoyed would include; Panels: Douglas Coupland, Attack of the ARGs, Learning from Adult Sites, Warren Spector on Storytelling and Will Wright’s Keynote. Parties : Great British Booze-Up, Pure Volume, Frog Design.