I'm in Los Angeles for my company's annual Sales and Marketing Kickoff. We recently changed our Sales year (again), so it had been 18 months since our last Kickoff, which also was in LA. All of us on the technical team have been here since Wednesday night, starting our sessions on Thursday morning. On Sunday we completed our technical sessions. Over the three days we had lots of jQuery training and exercises, custom visualization creations, competitive POC simulations, and our team projects of custom applications and presentations. My team made an interactive analytical dashboard for historical severe weather events in the US. NOAA tracks all of that and provides the data on data.gov, so we took the data set and made our application based on it, which let you do things such as see a bar chart of the total number of events by type (tornado, hail, drought, etc.) for a state of your choosing and to drill down to see the monetary damages and injuries/fatalities. It was a fun project, but we didn't finish until 11pm that night, which is often how these things go. But there are elements of fun as well, as my colleague Mica hosts a poker tournament each night. Once the actual Kickoff starts (when all the non-technical Sales and the Marketing people arrive) which happened on Sunday, the sessions get easier, but the days are just as packed. In this picture you can see where at a team dinner, those of us from Kansas noticed a beer on the menu from our own KC company, Boulevard Beer, which is regional, but not generally national. But the restaurant happened to have Boulevard's Tank 7 on the menu as one of their special beers, so all of us from the Kansas office (Michael, Virgil, Jesse, Kris, me, Rob, and Kevin) took a picture holding our KC beer. Last night we had our main company party, which had great food and included a lip sync contest that was really fun. Tonight is our dinner party, which will be the last event, as we all head home tomorrow.
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