I have gone through all 92 of the CFP submissions. There are a bunch of talks that I would love to hear but I have narrowed it down to around 30. The review tools on Papercall were less than ideal but I was able to download all the submissions in a csv and have Claude whip up a quick frontend to make things easier. I have some ideas for next year making this even better. I also decided I am going to wait until RBQ and Blue Ridge have posted their speakers before I make my final decisions so that we don't accidentally end up picking all the same speakers. In hindsight I probably closed my CFP a little early. All lessons for next year.

This week I interviewed Irina Nazarova, the organizer of SF Ruby Conference (and also a keynote speaker at Blastoff Rails) about her experience. I haven't interviewed an organizer in a couple months and it was really nice to dive deep into conference theory with someone again. It kinda got me back into organizer mode after taking a bit of a break over the holidays. It was also a reminder of how much work I still have to do and a good wake up call. I will get the video of our call uploaded and posted this week.

One thing that Irina mentioned that she wish she had done for marketing was to come up with some fun experiment each week (a video, a simple app, an interview, etc). I plan to try this. It sounds doable. I will probably start after we choose our speaker lineup (which gives people more reasons to buy a ticket). In the meantime I need to brainstorm the experiments.