Don't Forget Forcelandia

I know, I know, everyone else is posting their Dreamforce 2018  recap. And I’ll be doing that too in a bit. But right now I am LONG overdue in sharing my recap of Forcelandia, and I’m tired of seeing my reminder to myself to write this post. So here goes.
 
Back in August I went to Denver to attend the 2nd annual WITness Success conference (you can read my recap of that wonderful event here). At WITness success I co-presented a session with Charly Prinsloo about the #JourneytoCTA, and it went so well that she invited me to co-present with her again at Forcelandia.  I’d never been to Portland, and I really enjoyed my first community event experience, so I immediately started scheming on how I could fit this trip in. Luckily, I was going to end up being on the west coast for a work meeting earlier in the week, so it wasn’t too much farther to fly up the coast. 

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The day before the conference, as I was waiting for my Uber to take me to LAX to fly to Portland, I got a call from Charly. I knew something was up immediately, and she told me that she was sick and wouldn’t be able to make it to Forcelandia. Eek!
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I decided to go forward as a solo presenter, rather than cancel our session. But I had to think through how I would make our duo presentation a solo talk. I had time to think, because my flight was delayed. I landed in Portland just after midnight and headed straight to the Airbnb I was sharing with the amazing Kristi Campbell, who met for the first time at WITness Success. 

​​Forcelandia is one of the only, if not the only, Salesforce community event focused on curating top notch developer-centric content.  It’s in it’s 4th year, and is held at Mcmenamins Kennedy School, a former elementary school turned eccentric hotel. It reminded me a lot Hogwarts, but with a more confusing floor plan.
 
The event itself was fantastic. Tons of brilliant Salesforce folks were presenting and/or in attendance, including Kevin Poorman, David Liu, Steven Herod, Carolyn Grabill, Zayne Turner and Irena Miziolek, just to name a few.

​​Highlights included Leslie Gestautas singing the Forcelandia Fight Song, Zayne Turner making an epic entrance during the Opening Keynote, the Women in Tech breakfast featuring CTA Irena Miziolek, and learning a ton from Melissa Hansen during her amazing presentation on Lightning Component Communication. 

​​My session went well, but it was a lot different than the WITness Success presentation. It was a smaller room, and my energy alone is quite different from the energy Charly and I had together. That said, a lot of people came up to me after I was finished and told me that they enjoyed my session a lot, and that it felt like a safe space. On way back to Boston I decided that I needed back-up for the 40 minute breakout session I would be doing at Dreamforce. Luckily, two of my favorite Arch Ladies agreed to join me. Stay tuned to hear about how Ladies Be Architects took Dreamforce!