To be honest, Joe Olsen is a little relieved and a little excited to hand off his baby, the Heartland Developers Conference, to someone else.
AIM, the tech-growing nonprofit behind the successful AIM Infotec conference, is organizing the 11-year-old event this year.
“Personally, I’m excited to see this not be mine anymore,” Olsen told SPN last week. “It’s been such a labor of love for a long time, but I’ve grown it as much as I can… I would not be surprised to see AIM take this to a 1,500 person event in the next few years.
“I’m going to step back and enjoy it and be along for the ride.”
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Olsen said he expects the same laid back atmosphere of connecting and learning, but a better run event with more resources now that AIM is in the driver seat.
There’s more of everything, too: more labs, more speakers, content, networking opportunities and a giant party on Wednesday.
Olsen said the big trends this year continues to be mobile development, although web development is making a comeback, especially in the enterprise space. Developers are also starting to think more closely about user experience and design.
“There’s lot of those story arcs that you’ll see, but HDC started out with networking as a prime focus and using educational piece as a backdrop,” Olsen said. “We wanted to create an atmosphere where people get together and share knowledge with each other.”
More than 600 developers and designers from 40-plus states will attend the conference Wednesday through Friday. Less than half come from Omaha. Many are repeat attenders.
Olsen calls it almost like a reunion.
“It’s nice to have smart people at a company, but connected people are sometimes better… you don’t always know how to solve something you can reach out to your network for help,” he said.
Olsen started the developer conference in 2003 in Des Moines. About 100 people attended the day long event. It was a way for user groups to get together and learn. Back then, Olsen says, there weren’t many other events around the Midwest. Microsoft heard about HDC and bought in as a big Midwestern event for developers to learn Microsoft technologies.
It’s evolved over the years to include more design, creative thinking and engineering. And it just kept getting bigger to where Olsen, who also founded Phenomblue, couldn’t do it on his own.
AIM stepped in and now has the opportunity to grow it more, he said.
“They’ve already surpassed what I could do with it in the first year… It will become more successful, better run event under their watch,” Olsen said.
