That time of the year, dear reader, is once again upon us. That time spanning anywhere from mid-January to early February where for 13 years I would kiss my wife and kids goodbye, board a plane heading south to Orlando and spend a week drinking from a firehose of knowledge about a product that helped keep a roof over my head for many a year.
Yes, I'm talking about Lotusphere.
It's been a while, 7 years to be exact, since I last made a pilgrimage south to join the other faithful for a week of leaning, fun, networking, more fun, long days walking many steps between sessions, more fun and fun. It's really hard to put into words what that conference meant for not only me but I think for a wider audience of those that attended frequently. You see, we were admins and developers of a product then known as IBM Lotus Notes/Domino. Now many in the IT world have a silent chuckle to themselves when they hear that product name and that's okay. IBM did a terrible job marketing a product that was truly powerful yet they could never get that message across to big business. Sure, there were some marketing the product, like a well-loved Tasmanian madman widely known through the Domino world, but at the ground level IBM as a whole was just garbage at marketing. They kept trying to reinvent the product for what it wasn't and weren't able to sell what it was. Microsoft on the other hand spent a lot of time and money telling big business that Domino was crap and their products were the correct way to go. In the end for a lot of us who are now former admins and developers, that anti-marketing strategy worked. But we, the ones that worked with the product day in and day out knew what we had. For me, it was always a hard-sell internally to get them to latch on to furthering the products footprint in the environment and in the end I was with the first group of many that followed that were "downsized strategically". But I will never regret the time I spent with that product or going to events like Lotusphere or the other regional conferences that were held. I grew a lot during that time. Not only coming out of my shell but actually successfully submitting a session abstract and getting to present that for a full 90 minutes in front of a room of about 70 people. Full 90 minute show-and-tell with live demo. Walking that tightrope of will the VM's running on my laptop crap out on me in the middle of the presentation or not going step by step using a "cookbook" of instructions I created over the years and posted here on this now dormant blog. Having the IBM product manager walk up to the front afterwards, shake my hand and tell me I did a bang up job and hit all the marks. Yes, it was a good feeling. A reminder that if you don't try something new and push yourself to do something different you'll never know what you can accomplish. So that's just my story, but I know from the friend base that I made over the years going to that conference there are many similar. It was truly a rewarding a special experience in my professional career that frankly I don't think will ever occur again. Especially these days with where my career is now.
So, I decided to break out a post one more time on this blog. This was a place where before Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms we would share and contribute to the group-think. Those were good times. And I will always be grateful that I lived them.
Thank you to all of those who I met through this times that helped me out, not only professionally but personally, in my journey.
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