Decompressing after Future of Web Apps…

The conference is over and the reviews are in and I appear to have survived with a decent proportion of the people who wrote about it seeming to think it was a good and useful talk. I cannot tell you what an enormous relief that is. There’s something about the Carson events that I find more intimidating and scary than almost any other conference I’ve ever done. The audience is quite substantial, you’re on a big stage separated from them and there are lights on you and dramatic music and it all feels a bit like you’re on Broadway rather than mumbling incoherently to a bunch of your colleagues and peers. Still, the talk went successfully and pretty much as soon as I came off stage I felt a weight lifting off me and after a good night’s sleep everything became entirely more manageable in the world.

I honestly don’t know that I’d have got the thing together in the first place though without Simon‘s help. He really performed way beyond the call of duty by coming into the office with me on a Sunday and calming me down while I tried to block through the whole thing from beginning to end. I know it sounds ridiculously melodramatic but standing up and talking to eight hundred odd people is bloody terrifying to me and having someone to just reassure me that I wasn’t going to be talking unmitigated bullshit really helped. Other people who were incredibly helpful included Denise Wilton, Suw Charman, Paul Hammond, Cameron Marlow, Cal Henderson, Matt Webb, Elina Rubuliak, Ben Cerveny and Matt Biddulph. Thank god for friends, eh? And thank god it’s only large-scale public speaking that really gets me quite this tense, otherwise I’d be a non-functioning drool-heap most of the time.

Anyway, I’m going to try and get my slides online in the next few hours, but I just thought I should probably surface and say thanks to everyone who came to the talk, who has given me feedback afterwards and particularly to those people who helped me out during the process. And obviously, if I’ve forgotten anyone then please remember, I was a burned out shell of a man about three days ago and it’s really not intentional.