Midwest Dreamin’ 2016 Recap & Roaring Ryan

Last week was Midwest Dreamin’ at Chicago’s Navy Pier.  Those not familiar, Midwest Dreamin’ is a massive Salesforce user group conference. It’s organized by Salesforce User groups for the Salesforce community. This year we saw around 700 people show up to walk through the expo hall, watch the demo jams and attend over 30 sessions. There was also 3 keynotes with Erica Kuhl, Vala Afshar, and Peter Coffee. It also had Roaring Ryan, but we’ll get into that near the end of this post.

So let’s do a quick run down.

Expo Hall

The expo hall was full of great sponsors and vendors. I won’t go into all of them. I did get a nice surprise from Conga who had made MVP baseball cards. These were supposed to be at the salesforce World Tour Chicago back in April, but got left behind due to snow storm. So it was nice to see them.

Conga MVP Card

Demo Jams

Demo Jams are something pretty fun. Each vendor has a set time limit to do a live demo of their product. This year it was 3 minutes. That’s not a lot of time to show your stuff. This year, the community got to select a winner and it was Tact

Sessions

One of my favorite sessions I attended this year was on one of my favorite topics: Governance. Justice Sikakane did a great session covering why it was important and his journey with Governance at Cargill. He’s going to be giving this presentation at Dreamforce – so check him out.

Of course, and this is a completely non-bias opinion, my second favorite session was a live recording of the WizardCast with Peter Coffee. We had a great conversation that covered everything from Pokemon Go to robots taking over the workplace.

You can find that episode here: https://thewizardnews.com/2016/07/25/wizardcast-elysium-avoidance-peter-coffee/

Free Dreamforce Passes!

There were two free Dreamforce passes given out at the end of the event. 2 pieces of paper were tapped underneath chairs. The lucky person sitting on the chair won. And guess what?! I won!

Of course, I’m lucky enough to get a free pass because I’m a Salesforce MVP. The rules were that if you already get a free pass to pass it to the person on your left. So here’s the lucky winner:

Congrats to both winners!

Finally, Roaring Ryan

By far, one of my favorite moments at Midwest Dreamin’ was Roaring Ryan. This is no other than Ryan Headley from Apex and the Limits wearing Lion PJs.

Why the Lion PJs? Well fans may remember a little WizardCast episode where Mark and I interviewed Apex and the Limits. Shortly after that a twitter conversation started that ended with a wager that Ryan wear Lion PJs at MidWest Dreamin’ if their interview episode go 200 downloads by the end of release week. We hit that number a whole day early. You can find that episode here: https://thewizardnews.com/2016/05/02/wizardcast-sing-long-podcast/

You can find the twitter conversation that started it all here: https://twitter.com/rrogers09/status/727217005976145920

So, here’s the results: Roaring Ryan.

Personally, I think he should dress up as a Lion at Dreamforce. What do you think?

Enjoy https://youtu.be/mr3FXIx7dOc