JoomlaDay Chicago – yet another amazing Joomla event!

Hello, hello – your conference aficionado reporting again! Our support for open source project events continues and I’m eager to tell you about the last JoomlaDay we sponsored and attended – JoomlaDay Chicago 2012 – August 10-11. We must be very lucky, because just like all the conferences we’ve been attending this year, JoomlaDay Chicago made no exception and was a total blast – amazing talks on Joomla and hosting, passionate community members, friends and lots of beer fun! Read on, to feel the vibe!

To speak or not to speak?

The event kicked off with welcoming speech from the organisers who, by the way, did an amazing job! Kudos to Mike Carson and Philip DeKoker! (and thanks for bearing with me during the whole organisational period, I know I was giving you hard time sometimes). After the first keynote speech, it was Tenko’s session topic was “Squeeze Maximum Performance From Your Joomla Website”. Let me tell you this talk’s story – first of all, it wasn’t meant to be a technical presentation at all and then it wasn’t meant to be given by Tenko. Initially, our COO – Reni was supposed to give the presentation, but it turned out she wouldn’t make it to the conference and we had to think of an alternative plan, which of course was our almighty mastermind. Tenko tends to be a little bit reluctant about public speaking and it took some effort to convince him to make a presentation he hadn’t initially planned. I must tell you though, that this speech was his best one so far – and I’m obviously not telling this just to please my boss. The immediate tweets we’ve got speak for themselves, it seems everyone appreciated the tips and tricks he shared:

Slides are available here

Much more than just customers…

So much for the Friday sessions, I couldn’t attend any others that day. We were swamped at our booth the whole afternoon talking to amazing and inspiring people. The majority of the attendees were mostly developers, site implementers and overall – mostly advanced Joomla users, many of which not only signed up for accounts with us directly at the event, but also were interested in our affiliate program to spread the word about SiteGround.

Seeing the great interest of the people, who haven’t used our services yet is great, but what really makes my day is interacting with existing customers and seeing them sharing their SiteGround experience with other users. And we are not talking just about our official “word of mouth hero” – Megan Valentine, whom we already have a tradition to meet on each event in Chicago we go to!

We were happy to meet in person several other amazing people already using our services, among which one particularly stood out and this was Alin Steglinski. He is a long time SiteGround customer and special to us in many ways – smart, positive, extremely resourceful, and always willing to help. Alin has an inspiring (least to say) story. He has gone through the worst in life and you can read his story here. So what does bring Alin, SiteGround and JoomlaDays in one place? We had one free conference ticket to give away, and when Alin understood we’re coming in his town, he was super excited about meeting us in person. Oh, and so we were! I had no doubts I’m giving away the free ticket to him and luckily enough, despite his parents busy schedule they made it to the conference. It was a great pleasure to meet him in person and I am really glad we have such an amazing customer and now I may dare to say – a friend!

Get ready for Joomla 3.0

Speaking of friends, yet another friend of ours – Brian Teeman who visited us just the week before, was there to give the Saturday keynote on Joomla 3.0. The new Joomla version coming up this September, is definitely the hottest topic in the Joomla community and, as always, Brian presented it in a very attractive and engaging way. He decided to completely ignore the business attire requirement and surprised the audience when he put off his business casual suit and continued the talk in his almighty Joomla PJs. That’s the spirit to get people excited for the new Joomla version which we have already discussed in our post about JAB too.

Beer is on SiteGround!

As I have always told you, I consider an event successful, if it has been fun, among other things and needless to say, JoomlaDay Chicago was more than fun. What else could it be when the beer for Friday and Saturday nights was on us? I’ll just tell you that the free beer tickets expired at midnight on Saturday night, and since we had around 80 tickets left on the last party night and it was close to midnight already, we asked the bartender to get us all the 80 beers and the rest… is history.

More photos, as usual on our Facebook page.

Yours,

Tina
The SG events ninja