I have been eagerly anticipating today since I got my Collision ticket back in October of last year. I have never been to an industry conference and the naive nerd inside of me was squeeing in utter delight that I finally get to go to a conference. My coworker, Paul, and I took a whole hour to pore over the seminar descriptions and set up our joint schedules.

Day one of the conference definitely did not disappoint. We got plenty of schwag and saw quite a few really fantastic talks.

Some highlights from today…

1. Schwag! Got some pretty neat socks from GitLab and a cute desk shark and tote from ♥Digital Ocean♥. We were also able to get a book on learning the Wolfram Programming Language, which was new to both Paul and I.

2. Mikko Hypponen’s talk about web security and the reasons cybercrime occurs was incredibly interesting and thought provoking.

3. Jeff Lawson’s talk about making mistakes along your career path and finding the work that you have conviction in was inspiring to me. He was an animated speaker and was not so subtly nudging me and everyone else in the audience in the right direction for our careers.

You can follow my live tweets of the conference here.