Minnebar 18

Today was one of the biggest days of the year for the technology community of the Twin Cities — Minnebar 18! Once again Best Buy Headquarters was a gracious host sponsor and Minnestar welcome over 1,000 passionate technolgies to partake in at least 80 sessions led by members of the community. Tyler and I had a great time and attended many sessions.

Let’s Invest: Building Strong Community and Empowering Our Future with Steve Buchanan
Mastering LLM Optimization: RAG, Fine-Tuning, and Combined Strategies with Prashanth Pollishetty and Varun Kodathala
Google Sheets + AI, the new Brainstorming, and Custom GPTs with Jeffrey Williams
Retro-Computing Hobby with Girish Jorapurkar
DevSecOps the Good, the Bad, the Ugly with Brian Dolan-Goecke

Large convention hall filled with hundreds of attendees seated at tables facing a presenter on a stage with a large projection screen.
The main room as the day gets kicked off.

Purple Minnebar t-shirts with yellow and pink graphic print laid out by size on a long blue table at an indoor event.
Minnebar 18 t-shirts ready! They look amazing!

Two smiling men pose together at a tech conference, one wearing an Electronic Frontier Foundation shirt, the other an LED display shirt and Minnebar name badge reading Colin.
Ran into Colin Hirdman who had this incredible display integrated with his shirt.

Packed conference room with attendees seated and standing along the wall watching a presenter at dual screens showing a slide about leveraging LLMs for enterprise solutions.
One of our sessions learning about LLM techniques.

Man in blazer speaking on stage before a large screen showing a photo collage, audience seated at colorful chairs in a convention center.
Steve Buchanan introducing himself as he gets Session 0 (aka Minnebar Keynote) going.

Large crowd of attendees queuing down a staircase and along a hallway inside Best Buy headquarters during a tech conference.
Very, very long line for pizza.

Six people smiling and posing together in a building hallway, several wearing Minnebar 18 t-shirts and name badge lanyards.
Great to see Maria Boland Ploessl, Benjamin Ortega, me, Jeff Sellner, Tony Collen, and Adrienne Peirce.

Presenter at a podium speaks to about 15 attendees seated at tables in a conference room, with a slide on a wall-mounted TV screen.
The session we attended Retro Hardware.

Bearded man speaking on stage at a tech conference, with a large SPS Commerce sponsor slide projected behind him, attendees seated at tables in the foreground.
SPS Commerce is a terabyte sponsor of Minnestar!

Group of eight people posing and smiling in front of an SPS Commerce Terabyte Sponsor screen at an indoor event venue
We didn’t get everyone, but several of #TeamSPS got together for a team photo at Minnebar 18!

👋 Awesome community members that I got to say Hi to at Minnebar (incomplete and unordered)…

Bridget Kromhout, Nate Anderson, Levi McCormick, Jeanette Dorazio, Justin Porter, Casey Helbling, Paul DeBettignies, John Roberts, Jenna Pederson, Colin Hirdman, Samantha Grumdahl, Matt Decuir, Gordon Raup, Maria Boland Ploessl, Adrienne Peirce, Jeff Sellner, Tony Collen, Benjamin Ortega, Corwin Diamond, Bode Falade, Mark Gritter, Nikki Riemersma, Jim Bernard, Pete Clark, Tor Flatebo, Tori Peraza, Melissa Buening, Jade Barker, David Duccini, Peter Edstrom, Graeme Thickins, Molly Doyle, Robert Weber, John Murphy, John Kelly, and Robert Speer.

See also Minnebar collection.