Welp… I’m back on the East coast. Even thought I was only at SXSW for a couple days, I am exhausted. It was a whirlwind as it always is, but this time, I think it left a bit of a bad taste in my mouth. I’m going to publish the things that I liked, didn’t like, and just can’t stand from this year’s SXSW experience.

I’m probably never going back to SXSW. The festival (or conference or shindig or spring break for nerds, or whatever you want to call it) has reached a scale that I just can’t handle. But I could be swayed to return if there’s some clarity around the mini-events, the micro-tracks of of speaking or if there are going to be a lot of people I know. In the meantime, here’s a bunch of blog posts about what I liked and didn’t like.

GOOD: Speaking

I’ll start off with something good: speaking at SXSW as part of the Tweak Your Talk workshop was great.

Speakering. I has it.

This year I had the pleasure and honor of helping my friends Dan, Adam, Russ, Brad, and Laura with a workshop where we gave (almost) last-minute speaking coaching to SXSW speakers. It went really well, and I’m so grateful to be a part of it. The participants were great, the facilities and volunteers were great, it was really nice all around.

Twitter responded especially well to one of our participants, Alfred Lui, who had a great talk about measuring design work. He partnered with Adam for a mentoring session and it sounds like things went really well.

I had the pleasure of working with Matt May on his presentation. He told the story of the accessibility community’s contribution to our cell phones and our need to take that to the next level by embracing Universal Design.

Even one of our mentors benefitted from the class’ feedback. The class helped Russ Unger set up the opening of his talk. Russ is a killer presenter and the reviews were glowing.

A good time was had by all, congrats all around! And many, many, many, many thanks to Dan Willis for letting me come on as a mentor.