I went to the latest Pause on Error to learn what I don’t know. I walked away still not knowing a whole lot, but being energized to learn.

Held over Memorial Day weekend at “The Presentation Center” (a dry name for a wet place) in Los Gatos, California, this PoE  earned the nickname “FileMaker Summer Camp”. The bucolic location in the Santa Cruz mountains on a site loaded with natural beauty and Catholic iconography, was simply stunning. I saw a deer my first half hour on the property, and another trio a couple hours later. In the morning, clouds blanketed the tops of redwoods. In the afternoon, a free permit got us onto miles of trails in the bordering nature preserve. It may have been too ascetic for those hoping for a traditional tech conference experience. There was no hotel bar. No lazy river. No double beds, television, housekeeping, or even private bathrooms. The first session started at 6:30 in the morning.

Spartan by most standards, it was not everyone’s cup of herbal tea, but it sure was mine. It was pretty much exactly what I needed at this point in my life. Maybe lots of experiences could have been, but this one was.

The organizers, Todd Geist of Geist Interactive; John Sindelar, of Seedcode; and Ernest Koe of the Proof Group, intended to push 70+ developers to try something different and they succeeded. Todd’s yin meshed well with John’s yang as both exhorted/encouraged attendees to learn, adapt, and challenge themselves. They led by being vulnerable, creating a space where others could be too. The weekend was the most intimate conference I’ve been to.

Each morning and evening there was a 90 minute meditation led by John Tarrant of the Pacific Zen Institute and Todd Geist. Between 15-30 people were seated at each 6:30am session. Generally, conference attendees respected a silent breakfast after the morning meditation. The food was basic buffet and nourishing. Before dinner, Jonny Lee, a Chi Running instructor, led a attendees in a stretching and running technique.  John Tarrant led the evening meditation with a koan (which I learned is pronounced “ko-ahn”), and interlaced the quiet sitting with a discussion of the experience. One koan, asked by John Tarrant in his resonant voice: “Quickly, without good or evil, what is your original face before your parents were born?”

Between breakfast and the afternoon running session were more standard conference sessions. The intention of Pause is to be a “participatory” conference where attendees present, however, the sessions, scheduled with two in the morning and two in the afternoon for 2 1/2 days didn’t really pan out that way. The sessions I attended fell into three rough categories…technical, inspirational, and discussion.

I attended

Friday
Jason Young (Seedcode): Technical. Visual apps using <canvas> in a web viewer
Todd Geist (eponymous): Inspirational: Use APIs to access the immensely vast library of the world’s tech
John Sindelar (Seedcode): Inspirational: Embrace the “I don’t know”

Saturday
Vince Mennano (Beezwax): Technical: Data Visualization usingTableau
Rosemary Tietge (FMI): Discussion. Filemaker Community
Todd Geist: Technical. Full stack, node.js

Sunday
John Renfrew: Technical. Data visualization with d3
All: Discussion. Presenter / Spectator general discussion

There were several sessions I missed. Obviously, the few times sessions ran concurrently, I would have missed one. I also skipped a time slot every afternoon for a nap. And an extra afternoon session for a run. Those that I missed were:

Jason Young: hitting the SaleForce API. Matt Navarre: Running FM on AWS. Nancy Botkin & Mark Lemm: JSON. Lui de la Parra: Node and FM. Ernest Koe: Enterprise FM. Jason Young: cURL, card windows.

Of the sessions I saw the discussion and the inspirational sessions resonated like a singing bowl. The technical ones were too technical for me, and there was a significant  overlap between subjects.  Unfortunately, there were simply not enough sessions. I contributed to that by not presenting.

Evenings wound down differently. The first night I was asleep 20 minutes after evening meditation. The second, I had a quiet discussion with a couple great developers afterwards. And the third night, I spent hanging out at ‘Lower Maria’, the cabin where Canadians go to party.

My professional takeaways were more inspirational, around the importance of trying new things and pushing my knowledge into new technical areas. Namely, using API calls to web services to do the grunt work of development; learning javascript; and terminal / command line programming.

My personal benefits were an interest in Zen practice and an deeper appreciation for my fellow FileMaker developers.

I have found the conferences I enjoy the most are the ones in which I return energized. This conference was great in that I am coming home with something that I won’t just use in my professional life, but in my personal one too.

I can’t express my gratitude to the organizers, presenters, and other attendees enough. It was a wonderful experience.

Cheers!

-David Jondreau

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