Not Supposed to be Here Today
May 1, 2025Tags: conferences
As I prepare for Stir Trek 2025, Dante from the Kevin Smith films is in my head, saying “I’m not even supposed to be here today”. So let’s talk about this.
Stepping Down from Stir Trek - 3 Years Ago?
I think it was technically 3 years ago when I stepped down from Stir Trek. I had helped with organizing wherever I was needed, and I especially enjoyed my work with the volunteers. I was lucky to work with some amazing tech community members to make the event appear seamless and smooth to the attendees. To this day, I stay in touch with most of them via LinkedIn. If you’re one of them who has lost contact, find me on LinkedIn!
I stepped down this time for another conference. MSPGeekCon was in the planning phases for their Year 1 event. It’s a community-run event that focuses on upskilling the technicians in Managed Service Providers (MSPs). I’ve known about the MSPGeek community due to my husband being at an MSP for a long time. They wanted to run a community-run event and needed some advisors who might know something about that. We’ve had some of their organizers come to CodeMash to see how a community-run event feels, and I think that set them up for success.
Now when I switched over to MSPGeekCon, I knew 2025 would be the year of date conflicts. So I figured that if I stepped back from Stir Trek when I did, it would give Stir Trek enough time to reach out to me to work out any volunteer chaos if needed before the date conflict. Carey Payette has since taken over the volunteers at Stir Trek, and she’s doing a fantastic job at coordinating them and keeping things moving as if it’s smooth.
I also figured that the newer conference might still need me around to help them at Year 3. So I counted on going to MSPGeekCon in their Year 3. However, the universe had other plans in mind.
Stepping Down from MSPGeekCon - Late 2024
At the beginning of the Year 3 planning, I stepped down from MSPGeekCon. I didn’t step down because of the conference itself. They are doing great things there, and so much community is happening. In fact, I feel like they’re at a spot where they don’t need me. They’ve got the base of the conference pretty stable. They know what they want and where they want to go with it. They’re doing fun things too - lightning talks, game room, DnD stuff, and finding geese for charity last year. There’s just a lot of awesomeness at MSPGeekCon. I’m so proud of them!
I left them because of a potential role in another conference. That role had a lot more responsibility for a conference of its size, so I stepped down from MSPGeekCon to focus on that.
Stepping Down from CodeMash - Early 2025
So I left MSPGeekCon since I was invited to shadow Alyssa Diaz in coordinating the speakers for CodeMash. Having helped with session review many times, I know that just session review is a challenge, let alone the coordinating of speakers and building the schedule. Over the years, I’ve felt thankful to not have to coordinate an event of that size, and I didn’t envy the CodeMash scheduler. However, CodeMash will forever hold a spot in my heart as one of my favorite community-run events. So when I heard there was a potential to help with that, I decided to take it on.
For the 2025 event, I shadowed the role. If there’s anything you should know about me, it’s that I’m not a quiet shadow. I learn better by doing and getting feedback. This was a good opportunity to see what all was in store. It also gave me the opportunity to help create the documentation on how the speaker-related and session-related processes run. I got a lot of insight as to how the event runs and how much I enjoy the speaker coordination role.
But wait… the heading for this session indicates “Stepping down”. So what happened? I truly appreciated the opportunity and enjoyed being part of the organizing team. After some reflection, I realized that this just wasn’t the right time for me to take on that role. To be fully effective, I need to make sure I’m in the right headspace and have the right balance of tools, support, and bandwidth. It’s really more about knowing when I can give my best.
So what does that mean for me and CodeMash? This means that I can go back to submitting talks. I’ve already notified one of my favorite co-presenters, so expect more fun things coming from Brendan Enrick and me. I have some Bytesized Breakouts (2-hour workshop) ideas as well as KidzMash ideas. Rest assured, I’ll still be reminding you all of the CFP from August 15-31, with the other reminder of removing personal information since they run a blind round.
All this Stepping Down… So What’s Next?
Stir Trek is what’s next! But it’s not what you think - I’m not going back as a volunteer. I’m attending it this year! When I realized my situation, I was even more excited about going to Stir Trek. This year, I found out that most of teammates are planning on going, including one flying in and one who I haven’t been able to meet in-person yet in the 2 years that we’ve worked together so far. So it’ll be nice to finally meet these 2 teammates and see the rest of the crew as well. I’m also excited to be catching sessions that I’ve approved at other conferences over the many years (10+ years) of session reviews for many different conferences. I’m looking forward to sessions on HTML, CSS, Blazor, .NET Aspire, C#, and HTMX. My inner front-end geek is excited to be awake again!
So while things didn’t work out the way I thought they would, I’m heading to Stir Trek and finding my way again.
And if you hear me mention Dante, know that I thought I wouldn’t be at Stir Trek this year.