What was I thinking?

Welcome! I've had a lot of new people stopping by lately on account of my OSCON keynote. I'll be following up with a number of related posts, so if you're interested, you should subscribe to my RSS feed.

It’s at times like these, when I ponder my choice to give up life as a code grunt to be a community manager, that I’m tempted to kick myself. Sure, you feel bad if you miss a release deadline, but at least you don’t feel like a kid who invited everyone to her birthday party and then nobody showed up, you know?

We’re two weeks out from the second Freebase Hack Day, and I’m running round trying to get people to register. You know how it is: you contact everyone you know, nag them incessantly, tweet til everyone unfollows you, put it on your personal blog…

Our previous Hack Day. Photo credit: Greg Elin under CC-BY

But seriously, the last one was a blast, and I love the unconference format for how little organisation it actually takes to get heaps of intense, fascinating conversations going. Plus this year our hosted app development platform is ready for prime time, and I think that’s going to really spur a lot of rapid development. And the Semantic Web stuff has really picked up steam this year, so that’s a whole stream of stuff that didn’t really get much play last time round. And some of the Freebase Experts team are coming to town, and I’m just dying to meet them.

Photo credit: Greg Elin under CC-BY

There’s always a burst of registrations right at the end. I know this. I really do. But last night I had an anxiety dream that nobody showed up at all, and I was sitting in the empty office waiting for people who never arrived.

Don’t let it be real. Come to Hack Day. July 11th, San Francisco. It’ll be awesome.