I need to start this post by giving an enormous thank you to Pluralsight (PS) & A Cloud Guru (ACG) for inviting me to the greatest experience I’ve had of my professional life. I was able to meet and make new wonderful friends that I probably never would have had the opportunity to meet or interact with in a normal conference setting. And I was able to catch up with online and old friends, some that I had previously met in person and others that I would be meeting for the first time.
History
I’ve been associated with ACG for over five years now when I first purchased a package of courses (3 AWS Associate level) for $69 (USD), I still have the PDF invoice from it. I spent the next few weeks preparing for the AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate exam (which I passed) and then ten days later passed the AWS Certified Developer - Associate exam.
One of the ways I prepared for these exams was by answering as many questions I could on the ACG message boards. I figured that the best to know the material, was to help another student learn it. For some questions, I knew the answer right away, and for others, I could spend an hour or more researching the correct answer for someone I didn’t know.
After about six weeks since purchasing the courses, I was contacted by Rusty from ACG about one of my answers and the level of detail I went in to explaining what the correct answer was. From there, I was asked to be a Volunteer Message Board Moderator and the rest as they say, is history. :)
Over time, ACG merged with Linux Academy (LA) and the message boards stopped being used as frequently. With a new community of people like me, ACG created a Discord server for everyone to communicate. Those of us who were a VolMod are now called an ACG Insider where we help answer questions in Discord channels. A few months later PS purchased ACG and the Discord changed to Pluralsight Community Hub.
Is this Spam?
About six weeks prior to the event, I received an email from someone at PS and wasn’t sure if what they were telling me was real or spam. I quickly wrote my other ACG Insiders to see if they had received the same email. They, too, thought it might be spam, but since we all received it, it must be authentic.
Think of it as a mini summer camp—folks who invest lots of time in the community coming together for a couple days with other advocates and experts. (It’s a pretty intimate gathering, probably around 50-60 attendees, so hopefully there’s time to connect with everyone there!) Imagine plenty of thought-provoking conversations, time to recharge and maybe challenging someone to a friendly(?) tabletop game. Sure, learning will be an inevitable byproduct of attending, but it’s all about having fun connecting with other tech enthusiasts. (Personally, I’ll count it a major win if a few folks leave with plans to build some content together, or a new cohost for their podcast…I expect big things😂 )
But why me? That’s what many of us ACG Insiders were asking ourselves. It was hard for me to comprehend why I might be asked to attend such a small gathering. I’m nobody on the big scale of things, but I guess people at PS/ACG saw me differently than I see myself. After clearing it with my wife and manager, I was cleared to attend this “Un-conference”.
Who else will be there?
Over the few days in San Francisco, everyone I got the opportunity to chat with basically asked this question. It was a mystery, and I guess that was good because we all had a chance to discover who the attendees would be at the same time. It made it special not knowing ahead of time, outside the PS/ACG attendees, I’d never heard of the other attendees before I arrive in San Francisco.
Day 1
Check-in
The day finally arrived, and I got to meet up with some folks that I hadn’t yet met or talked to in years. In the first hour after my arrival, I got to meet fellow ACG Insider Chad Quinlan (in person). While hanging out in the reception lounge, I also got to meet up with some folks that I hadn’t yet met or talked to in years. In the first hour of my arrival, I got to meet/catch up with Lars Klint, Scott Pletcher, Mish Manners, & Steve Buchanan.
Dinner/Mingle
After getting an initial feeling for what this “un-conference” would be like, it was time for dinner/hors d’oeuvre’s. I got to spend more with Chad Quinlan & Justin Wheeler and learned more about each other and how we fit into the ACG eco-space.
I had great conversation with Angela Andrews about living around Philly (I previously worked at Villanova University) & working for RedHat remotely. I was trying to convince her to move to Raleigh, so she’d be based out of the home office here.
Throughout the rest of the evening, I was able to interact with people that I normally wouldn’t have had the opportunity to meet/chat with anywhere else. I spent a lot of time with Lars Klint, Jeremy Morgan, Scott Pletcher, & Jess Alvarez. I was able to spend a good amount of time with my old friend Alicia Cheah, discussing life, work, & Australia in general.
Day 2 - The “Un-conference”
Breakfast
After meeting up for breakfast, Chad Quinlan had suggested we take a short hike from the hotel to experience an Amazon Go store. I had heard of the concept of the store, you walk in and take what you want and then walk out, but never gotten to experience it. The six of us walk about half a mile from the hotel to the store. Overall, it was interesting. You open the Amazon app and scan the code to gain entry. Pick what you want and walk out. A few minutes later you’ll receive an email stating what you “purchased”.
Morning session
To start our first full day together, David Neal had everyone sit in four sections of the large conference room. David planned to have us to a coffee lightning talk where we put a topic on a sticky note, then we vote on which topics to discuss.
This was purely an ice-breaker to get everyone to open up and discuss the topics each group had selected. We were supposed to talk for five minutes and then vote to continue with the topic or move on to the next one. The topic for my group was about diversity and inclusivity in the workplace. We ended up talking about this for the full hour that David had allotted.
It was interesting to hear all the viewpoints on the subject. As a white male, I know that I’ve received privilege in the workplace. Hearing it directly from people of color and women who don’t, made it more real though. It made me rethink how things are/were done at places I’ve worked and how to try to make things better for them.
I’m grateful to have gotten to have participated with this group. Some members were, Jess Alvarez, Kim Maida, Heather Downing, Angela Andrews, Alice Meredith, Matt Stauffer, Lynn Langit, and Trey Botard. I know there were some more, but I can’t seem to find you on Twitter, sorry.
Afternoon session
The afternoon sessions was very interesting, Scott Pletcher clearly worked his butt off making an event filled afternoon. We had a tech trivia challenge, a scavenger hunt, to go with three technical challenges. Each challenge was worth 40 points.
- Tech Trivia
- Cage^2 tech challenge
- The Hunt for Red Herrings (Scavenger hunt in hotel)
- CLI and Chill tech challenge
- Worst Architecture Ever! tech challenge
I won’t share answers for challenge 1 as it’s supposed to be opened up to the public at some point, but they were extremely difficult. Here’s a few photos from the hunt (challenge 3):
My team, #RetroPanther barely won the challenges by 3 points. We didn’t attempt challenge 4, but here’s our entries for items 2 & 5.
Drag Bingo
As most teams were wrapping up their hunt, we could hear something coming from the hotel lobby area. I thought nothing of it and went back to my room to prepare for dinner. It didn’t take me long to get ready, so I headed to the lobby to see what was happening. Turns out there was Drag Bingo being played.
I took a seat with Rain Leander & Mish Manners where they convinced me to play bingo (it was mostly for the free drink chip :)). We played about 5 games and came very close to winning multiple times. When you needed one more square, we were supposed to yell, “It’s on, bitches!!!” Rain won a round as did I, and Mish was desperate to get a bucket hat as a prize, she convinced the hotel staff to give her 2-3 of them after we were all finished. It was a good time, and I came home with even more stuff than I had arrived with.
Dinner
PS went all out for dinner where they hired party buses to chauffeur us to International Smoke where we had a private room and got to mingle again. There were several courses and over the course of the 2+ hours, we all played Pub Trivia through Geeks Who Drink. My table nearly won, but we faltered on final round and just missed out.
Whiskey Bar
After we returned to the hotel after dinner, Jason Valentino recommended a whiskey bar a short walk away. I’m not a whiskey drinker, so I wasn’t sure I should go.
Boy was I glad I went. The bar felt like a speakeasy as it was below/underground from the Hearst Building. It had a newspaper/printing theme since it was part of the Heart Building. There was live jazz and the alto saxophonist was absolutely amazing.
While at the bar, I was able to have to great conversation with Jason Valentino. We had talked the night before too, but this went deeper into how to help development teams advance, become more modernize, and transitioning a company to the cloud. It truly was one of the highlights of the trip for me.
Before heading back to the hotel, Banjo Obayomi, Michael Jenkins, and I had a lengthy chat about limitations of AWS CloudFormation and why I prefer Terraform over it. It was nice to hear that I wasn’t the only person who had similar thoughts on the matter.
Day 3
Tech Tips Showdown
During check-in on day 1 & throughout the rest of the time at the Link/, Lars Klint had a QR code for us to scan to fill a form with a “tech tip.” I wasn’t really sure what my tech tip should be, so I decided it should be something for AWS, “Why you should use SSM over SSH for accessing EC2 instances/ECS.”
Now, Lars wouldn’t tell us anything about what’d we’d be doing with these tips, other than, we’d need to defend them in front of the entire group. My assumption was, whatever your tip was, you’d need to give the pro side of it and then Lars would argue the opposite/con side of it.
Oh, boy was I wrong, and I couldn’t have been happier for it. Lars and team had set up an NCAA basketball style bracket of the tech tips and each person got a minute to pitch why their tip was better than the others. Afterwards, the group would vote on person A or B as to whose tech tip was better.
In the first round, I was paired up against Rachel Lee Nabors where they chose “Why comments are needed in code” as a tech tip. I thought I was set up perfectly because I disagreed with that stance as comments are obsolete the moment they’re put in to the code. So for my final 10 seconds, I stopped talking about why to use SSM and switched talking about why comments are bad. Needless to say, I didn’t advance to the next round, but I gave Lars a great idea for what the second round should be, talk bad about the tech tip of your opponent.
As the rounds continued, we had the entire group chanting “PHP” for the win, and then shortly after completely turn their backs on PHP for the loss. In the end, the Tech Tip that won was “Posting Questions in Public Forums.”
Departure/Returning Home
Eventually, this magic experience had to end. I was taken back to the airport where I was scheduled to fly through Atlanta to get home. Flying through Atlanta is always hit or miss, and I ended up missing my connecting flight by about one minute where I ended up staying the night at the airport. That is another blog post all to itself.
Conclusion
This was an event that I never expected to be a part of. I definitely made new friends and people I plan to stay in contact for years to come. Thank you, Pluralsight & A Cloud Guru for including me in this. This was a once in a lifetime event. “If they ever hold this event again, it just won’t be the same.” That’s the message I heard from many of those in attendance.
Having the limited number of attendees made for a great experience that will be hard to replicate. If Link/ is held next year, I hope that the attendance is kept to under 60 people again. That’s what made this so special, having it where it was so small that everyone needed to talk to each other.
If you would like to follow the folks from this “un-conf” on Twitter, here is a somewhat comprehensive list of all who attended. Thanks, Jeremy Morgan, for putting this list together.