URL: https://boxofchocolates.ca/archives/2012/05/22/indulgence/

Derek Featherstone's Box of Chocolates: You never know what you're going to get

Box of Chocolates

Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012 - 10:35pm

Indulgence

There were three indulgences from UX Lisbon 2012 that I cannot stop thinking about:

  1. The pasteis de belem. Oh. My. These tasted like nothing I’d ever tasted before. Heavenly.
  2. I saw almost all of the main conference talks. This doesn’t usually happen. I was comfortable with it at this conference because over at Simply Accessible, we hired a fantastic project manager to help us. You might know him – he’s Robert Jolly. Knowing he was keeping things moving back home really helped me not stress about work, so I could actually listen to the other speakers. I loved it and I can’t wait for more conferences where I can do this.
  3. Bruno took the leap of faith and allowed me to speak about something other than Accessibility. I talk about accessibility all the time, and generally have the freedom to talk about whatever I want. But there are only a few conferences that have encouraged me to go beyond accessibility if I so desired. Thank you, Bruno, on so many levels.

The UX Lisbon 2012 conference was rich with speakers that I’ve never met, but have always held in such high esteem, other speakers that I know but haven’t seen in a few years, and a very clearly advanced audience. For me, it was like a perfect storm of speakers and attendees. Judge the speaker lineup for UX Lisbon for yourself. You’ll see why I was so excited to join that crew on stage, to meet them for the first time, or to be reunited with them.

We also managed to get in some site-seeing, with the grand finale being a full day tour with several other speakers and spouses/partners/whatevers, organized by Bruno. I’d be understating it if I said it was a long day on Saturday. By the end we were all exhausted. But I’d also be understating it if I said that Bruno did an amazing job with the conference itself, the social events, and taking care of the speakers. Amazing just doesn’t cut it.

To everyone that I talked to, the attendees, the other speakers and friends, those that tweeted out soundbytes from my talk and workshop, and to our wonderful host, Bruno: thanks for indulging me.

2 Comments

Pasteis de Belém are the most sweetest and heavenly desert in my country.
Thanks for bring them to your blog :)
Best regards from Portugal.
José Gonçalves

Are you traveling more than consulting now? I still need to head up to go for a bike ride with you some time (not in the dead of cold, as it is now).

The pasteis look delicious…too bad the website is all Flash – oh the irony link.