Minnebar Rocked!

Excellent speakers and panels, and a great crowd yesterday at our local BarCamp event. More proof that we have a vibrant tech community here in Minnesota! Major expertise, lots of energized developers and entrepreneurs, and some exciting, budding startups in the works.
Also more proof that online and offline community can be mashed up successfully….

It was great to see a top VC firm in state, Split Rock Partners, as one of seven sponsors of Minnebar. I told partner Michael Gorman he blended right in wearing a tee shirt and shorts — love that! 🙂 And I saw him in the Ruby on Rails session that I also attended. (We have an outstanding group of “RonR” developers here, by the way.)

The turnout for the GetGoMN session was fantastic, with Scott Littman and George Reese telling the story behind the recently launched site to support entrepreneurs. Lots of great questions and input from several people. I’m convinced that promoting Minnebar on the GetGo site contributed to the record attendance. The biggest turnout yet for a BarCamp in this country! Yeeeee-haww!!!

Photo: Beers on the roof with event sponsors John Roberts (left) and Harold Slawik (right) of New Counsel plc, and Bill McLeslie of ipHouse. The event wi-fi was awesome — Bill hooked us up with 7 megabits of bandwidth. Gorgeous day in the Twin Cities — the high hit 83 F!

My favorite photo at the event: We start ’em young here in MN. Matt Bauer, ace developer just recruited to MotionBox in NYC (but he didn’t have to move!), shows a developer-in-training how it’s done. Matt had just finished his session on Adobe Flex.

Lots more photos on my Minnebar Flickr set. Other photo sets are linked on the Minnebar site. I suspect you’ll also be able to read some more about the event at the Star-Tribune’s Vita.MN site and in the Pioneer Press, because they both had people covering the event.

Coolest thing I learned at Minnebar? I met a former Google employee (an early employee), who moved back here from the Valley his wife, who was also a Google employee, and he’s about to launch a cool new web app online. Stay tuned….

Kudos again to the three hardest working event organizers on the planet (volunteers, yet!): Dan Grigsby, Ben Edwards, and Luke Francl…and, especially, a great big thank you to the sponsors. This all-day event is an annual thing, but evening events are held throughout the year, too. So, watch for the next “MinneDemo” and come learn and celebrate Minnesota innovation with us!