I woke up at a reasonable time today (Yay!), and arrived to breakfast a little after it started, around 7:15 or 7:30. The keynote wasn't scheduled until 9:30, so I wasn't too worried. I met up with Parker and Dylan for breakfast, and we ate pretty quickly. Dylan's competitive nature rubbed off on me, and we were determined to get good seats for the keynote. So we waited in line at the escalator up, then waited in line in front of the keynote doors. Which, incidentally, look like something you'd see in an airport hangar. We managed to get right in the front. Because we're awesome.
Two employees came around and told us we needed to stand behind a certain point, and that when the doors opened, we had to hold people back until the doors reached a certain height.
I have no idea why they did this, because they didn't actually open that door. They opened the one next to us. The jerks.
We still managed to get good seats, though. So I can't complain too much. If you're interested in the keynote, I'll embed it below.
After the keynote, we went to the sessions. Some of them were a bit over my head. Some of them were a bit obvious, to me at least. During the session, however, I got a tweet from Christian, a Twitter recruiter I know. He used to be a recruiter for Google. He wanted to know if I was in San Francisco for I/O. When I told him he was, he invited me and the #googleioparty (Dylan, Parker, and our honorary member, Kevin) to come have lunch at Twitter. I passed the message along, and we met up before lunch to travel to the Twitter offices, down the street from Moscone West.
The Twitter dining area has a really cool sign that displays a random tweet as they come in.
Christian took a picture of me and Kevin in the dining hall on my tablet.
Some engineers and documentation people came and sat with us, which was pretty awesome. We talked for a bit, and Kevin managed to get BarCamp Rochester their Twitter account back (they lost it when the person who set it up left).
After we left the Twitter offices, we walked back to Moscone for some sessions. This was followed by the Unicorn Summit, which I now get to talk about.
As it was described to me, the Unicorn Summit (or 'Advocate Summit' as it was officially dubbed. We used Unicorn Summit instead, because that name is so much more awesome) was basically a meeting between external advocates and the top executives at Google. They basically said "Hey, let's take external advocates and the top Google execs, put them in a room, and watch what happens." Which is essentially what happened. We met in the press briefing room, and the executives started taking questions. A lot of the questions were requests for support or calling the execs out on things the advocates took issue with. Which started making me feel bad; feedback should be praise for what was going right and criticism for what was going wrong. So I tried to balance out the sea of negative with a little bit of praise.
After the official Summit, project leads were available to us for questions. I met briefly with Shannon Madison, the University Program contact at Google and chatted with her about a few things. After that, we did some sessions, and met back at the GTUG lounge. We took some group pictures, and headed out for a dinner of Chinese on Google.
At the restaurant, I sat with Dylan, Joseph (the 14 year old), and a few other people. Shannon (the Google University person I spoke with) joined us, and shamed us all with her Chinese skills. We ate, talked, got swag, took pictures, and generally enjoyed each other's company for the last time.
Me and Joseph
Me, Dylan, and Steph. I look like a creeper.
Me and Van
After the dinner, I went back to my room. Dylan tagged along to say goodbye to Kevin. Kevin wasn't there, so Dylan and I chatted some. When Kevin showed up, Dylan said goodbye to us both. Which is sad. He was a bunch of fun to hang out with.
Kevin and I talked a bit as I packed, and then said goodnight.
I can't believe it's over. It's been quite the adventure.
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