Oh yeah, that's right, I went to SXSW 2008/03/19

I wrote this about a week ago and then forgot about it.  Best course of action is to just post it.

The hangover has ended, time for some reflection.

There were so many people this year that it expanded into new parts of the Austin Convention CenterCave System I didn't know existed.  The increased attendance was most noticeable at the parties where I frequently had to request favors to gain entry.  Thanks, pals.

The panel schedule this year was, to say the least, weird.  There were days on end that contained nothing of interest to me, even given my temporarily broadened interests (more on that later).  Emotional design?  Gaming?  Continued beating of the Internet video dead horse?  No thanks across the board.  Where was Khoi Vinh with a followup to his excellent grid design presentation from last year?  Where were Mark Boulton and Richard Rutter with more typography?  Hell, where were the Rails folks with at least something technical?  Answer: they were all at the same time on Monday afternoon.  I heard someone say they put all of the good panels in parallel to force people to choose so they wouldn't have one one ginormous panel in each block with empty houses everywhere else.  Slightly logical and incredibly annoying.

A quick list of favorites: the Kevin Rose led and Cal Henderson profaned panel on scalability; John Resig and company's panel on JavaScript libraries (Alex Russell and Andrew Dupont were hilarious); and icanhascheezburger.  In other words, I didn't learn a great deal.

I've been kicking around this idea in my head that started as my explanation for what I hope to get out of South-By: SXSW is a necessary yearly dose of design for engineers.  With as much fun as the "How to Rawk..." panels were to watch (again, learning absolutely nothing), it seems like a panel along those lines would float pretty well.  Thoughts?

Anyway I've finally gotten back to the real worldInternet and been hacking up some good sauce.  More on that whenever I damn well please.