Another Great Geek Dinner!

It started out as a rough evening. I wasn’t as prepared as I wanted to be by 4:30 pm, I tried to pick up my new set of business cards and they weren’t ready, I had to pick up some giveaways for the raffle still, the traffic was crazy HORRIBLE! But we were making it happen. Then Amy, our Admin Asst. at Provo Labs called me, she had been sideswiped on the freeway while driving to the dinner and wasn’t going to make it (understandably!). Aaron called me from the restaraunt and said that things were pretty messed up there, there was some hefty mis-communication and what I felt like was undisclosed information like we wouldn’t be able to sit together, they had wanted me to cover the full bill for everyone and have them pay me back! So when I finally got to the dinner people were standing around with buzzers in there hands!!! I had made all the arrangements and they were seating our people as if they had just shown up! I was pretty mad and went to talk to the manager. I had to get him to think out of the box which was really difficult and finally got an arrangment made so we could get seated. What a JOKE! If I knew how crazy it would be to use them I never would have!

So, we were scattered all over the huge restaraunt, I couldn’t even figure out how many people were there or where they were seated. It was off kilter, but was getting better – at least we all had food!

Then we got together for the fun portion of the dinner. We had introductions all around, talked about job openings and who was looking for a job, then had a long discussion about the future of DevUtah and how to build a better tech community. I think some people were bored by it, but I thought it was very interesting. We had some real momentum going in the discussion and it reinforced for me that people are passionate about wanting to get to know new people. This whole DevUtah project has really been an experiment, we weren’t sure how it would be accepted. It turns out that a lot of people love our ideas and are excited about seeing them come together! The coolest part was to take a quick poll and find out that at least half of the 70 or so people there hadn’t been to the last dinner! And this was of course in the middle of the holiday season. Which leaves me very excited about the turnout for the next one! I met lots of great people tonight. For me, that is the real test of the dinner. The whole purpose of it is to get a chance to meet technologists and business people and form new business relationships.

So even with all the mishaps, tonight was a really good and fun Dinner!

Oh, and we announced that the next one is going to be on January 17th. I’m hoping we can find a really good venue for this next one. I’ll blog, post on www.devutah.com and email everyone once we know where we’ll be able to do it.

Thanks everyone for coming out and making it a fun evening!!