I got an early flight from London, and arrived in real Portland in time to take the cruise which had been organized around Portland harbour. Now as those of you who followed Monktoberfest on twitter may have noticed Portland had some biblical weather<\/a> on Wednesday \u2013 and Stephen<\/a> wasn\u2019t even travelling.<\/p>\n Luckily the rain had cleared by the time the cruise was starting, and first thing that got me was just how beautiful the setting is. I have always had a soft spot for New England in the autumn and was once again reminded why that soft spot exists.<\/p>\n The talks were both what I expected and yet nothing like what I expected. From the opening moment of Justin Sheehy’s<\/a> talk on \u201cImpostor Syndrome\u201d, Luis Villa<\/a> on some of the challenges faced at Wikipedia to Samantha Ready<\/a> talking about developer evangelism the range, depth and effort put into each of the talks was incredible. Selecting a favorite is difficult, I am almost loathe too – however, as I have recently mentioned<\/a>, I really enjoyed Rafe Colburn’s<\/a> talk on \u201cBlameless Postmortems\u201d at Etsy, a subject close to my own heart, and which many companies aspire too but few can actually accomplish. Keep an eye out for when the videos get posted.<\/p>\n The hallway, and pub, discussions were great with lots of interesting conversations, sidebars and interesting anecdotes. The discussions and enduring friendships are what make these conferences different from later events.<\/p>\n Now as a conference that has craft beer as a core theme, in a state that is renowned for its craft beer, I was always expecting to taste something different. but the Allagash Farm to Face<\/a>\u00a0was just absolutely delicious, and far beyond my wildest expectations (its been an amazing beer month for me, not just with the Allagash Farm to Face, but I was recently treated to a Westvleteren<\/a>\u00a0by a friend). And there was chowder \u2013 do I need to say more?<\/p>\n If you have ever been involved in crafting an event that is something beyond an \u201cindustry standard\u201d conference, you know that it is both a lot of fun, and a huge amount of work. Attention to detail matters, and the small things attendees may not notice are the pieces, which will drive you mad on the day. I cannot speak highly enough of the work Stephen, Juliane, Rachel and Kate did to put together a truly exceptional conference, with incredible speakers, superb food and fantastic craft beers curated\u00a0by Ryan and Leigh.<\/p>\n So I\u2019ve been home, and I’m back on the road again (it is that season), but I am already looking forward to next year\u2019s event. If you want to experience a conference that is very different between now and then, our IoT focused conference, ThingMonk<\/a>, is running in London on December 3rd<\/sup> and 4th<\/sup>, while MonkiGras is on January 28th and 29th\u00a02016. Tickets are now on sale<\/a>, and for those that are very keen we have a created a joint early bird ticket<\/a> for both events.<\/p>\n As for a closing thought and that regret? My only regret is that it took joining RedMonk to get me to attend my first Monktoberfest. I should have joined in quite some time ago.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Several months ago I sat down with my wife and considered the pros and cons of joining RedMonk, was the life of analyst really what we wanted (I had a suspicion, that has been quickly confirmed, that you can not do this job properly with the support and understanding of your partner), what would the<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-conferences"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"IMG_1817\"](\"http:\/\/redmonk.com\/fryan\/files\/2015\/10\/IMG_1817-e1444762483424.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\n