When Kaleem invited me to dinner with Betsy Weber, chief evangelist at
TechSmith, I immediately cleared my
schedule and accepted. After all, I could make up for classes by
reading, and I could always catch up with the DemoCamp folks at the
afterparty. How often do I get to talk to established technology
evangelists?

It was *well* worth it. I can't believe I had that opportunity to
learn about tech evangelism (Hi Betsy!) *and* tech journalism (Hi
Saleem!), two of my favorite career choices. The lifestyle Betsy
described of going to conferences, building relationships with
passionate users (and sometimes really unhappy users!), bridging the
gap between developers and users… Wow. I want that. I want to do
that. The constant novelty and exposure to brilliant people that
Saleem described also appeals to me. I'm thrilled to hear that there
are such wonderful career choices out there, and that they're a natural
fit. As Joey de Villa
said at the DemoCamp afterparty, technology evangelism is the
best job for a technical extrovert. I want to finish my schoolwork as
quickly as possible so that I can start working on stuff like that.

On the way back, I mentioned that someone on the emacs channel had
pointed out that I was 4th on a Google search for
tech evangelist.
Saleem fact-checked it on his cellphone, of course. We were both surprised to find my site listed as the second and third hit. Whoa.

Probably not for long, but hey, cool!

So, plenty of warm and fuzzies from a totally awesome conversation, an
energizing afterparty, more encouraging career direction, a couple of
hugs, and a thoughtful gesture by Kaleem. Fantastic day. What an
awesome way to start my week. I'll send them hand-written cards
tomorrow.

Whee!

Random Emacs symbol: redisplay-dont-pause – Variable: *Non-nil means update isn't paused when input is detected.