Slack Frontiers: San Francisco

The View 👓

The Slack Frontiers conference was held at Pier 48 on September 5-6 in San Francisco. As a heavy user of Slack and as a previous resident of San Francisco, I was super excited to attend the conference.

Slack Frontiers 2018: Pier 48, San Francisco

Flying out of Missoula International Airport (MSO) is great – 12 minutes from Uber pickup to the airport and another 5 minutes to get through security. Less than 20 minutes. Nice.

✈️ MSO → SEA → SFO 🦀

We lived in the Bay Area when the San Jose Sharks were introduced as an NHL expansion team. I still have one of the stones used to build the arena. Irbe was a favorite, and so was Owen Nolan.

Owen Nolan 🏒

I landed at SFO on Wednesday before noon, waited for my bag, hopped on BART and was in San Francisco at 12:30. The conference opened at two – I dropped off my bags, grabbed the drone and walked (the long route) from Market and 7th to Pier 48. After registering, I poked around the conference floor.

Slack Frontiers Floor 🛒

Two things I’ve learned over the past year in attending conferences:

1. Full sheet conference collateral no longer exists

2. Conference attendees don’t like taking collateral

Things I might try if I was putting on a conference:

• Request all electronic collateral from vendors before the conference

• As the event organizer, send all collateral to all attendees and registrants after the conference

• Send attendee information to all vendors after the conference

There were only a handful of vendors which seemed to be a good amount.

Slack Collateral 📜

Entering the Main Hall early to get a good seat for the opening keynote, I took my spot in the back-middle row. I figured I was safe from any speech-related exercises.

I was wrong.

Opening Keynote Prep 📣

“Everyone in the back-middle row, please stand up. The first one to correctly answer this quiz receives my book. Oh – Everyone else, please turn around in your seats and stare at them until they answer correctly.”

Primed To Perform 📕 (I Won)

After the opening Keynote, I picked up my t-shirt and with the sun still up, flew the drone over the bay. We left San Francisco in 2007 – much of the city is the same. Those big buildings are new.

San Francisco Giants, Marina, Bay Bridge, Downtown 🏢

Starting early the next morning, I headed out in darkness hoping to catch the sun rise over the Bay and to take the long route (along the Embarcadero) to Pier 48.

My Schedule 📅

Hotel Room View 🌴

Missing Obama 💡

My SF Office 🏦

Hi Dive (🍸), Red’s Java House (☕️)

Innovation 🚽

Back at the conference, I picked up Channels – Slack’s printed magazine (good!), walked around the conference floor then took my seat for the Thursday’s opening Keynote.

Slack Channels 🗞

Atlassian 🐞

You Are Here 👉

Thursday Keynote 💬

After taking wads of notes, meeting with our friends from Okta and Atlassian, I stepped out of the closing Keynote then headed out to do some reminiscing.

Cha Cha Chas 💃

Mad Dog ⚽️

Neighborhood View 👀

The flight home took me through PDX, which meant I stopped by ¿Por Qué No?.

Yum 😋

To date this year, I’ve attended two conferences: Slack Frontiers and CIMC (in Squamish). Both have been terrific – in size, presenters and location.