Minnestar
Reflections on Twin Cities tech‑community events—Minnebar, Minnedemo and more. I explain the origin of “Minnebar,” recap sessions I attended and celebrate the people powering our thriving tech scene.
- I got the privilege of kicking off and introducing Ben and Luke this morning at MinneBar 6. About 1,000 people!
- MinneBar 6 is going down as the best MinneBar yet in my book. Awesome everyone!
- Leading a Minnebar talk on geeky tools to a room of geeks takes guts. Hats off.
- MinneBar Unix Geek
cat foo.txt | awk '{print $3}' | sort | uniq -c. - MinneBar Unix Geeks check out Cool, but obscure unix tools.
- What a great event! Pano shot from the stage at the start of Minnebar.
- At Intro to iPhone Development session.
- At Screw You, LAMP presentation from Dan Grigsby.
- At WordPress as a CMS session.
Minnebar 6

The new Minnedemo demo room is huge, which is great. Nice to have a place to sit. My buddy Ira grabbed a photo of me with my spiffy MacBook Air.
View from the balcony of Minnedemo!
Minnebar 5
Another record breaking attendance for Minnebar! It’s great that even in year 5 Minnebar is drawing a large group of new people still. What a vibrant community! The group in this one session is as big as the entire group from the first Minnebar.
At the JavaScript session at Minnebar. Full house.
Checking out GPU accelerated development on the iPad session at Minnebar. This is a good reminder why mathematical thinking matters when coding.
At Intro to Git session at Minnebar. The story of git’s creation by Linus always reminds me of a story from the Bible.
See also Minnebar collection.
Great Minnedemo tonight! Way to go everyone that demoed!
For fun, here are my photos from the first Minnebar in 2006. The whole group looks like one of todays sessions.
Add photos that were previously on Flickr.
Minnedemo on May 7th, 2009
The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for May 7, 2009 at 6:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so get signed up. There are 324 open tickets left at this point.
I’m a big fan of Minnedemo and find it a great place to connect with people and hear about some of the products and cool projects everyone is working on. Hope to see you there!
The next Minnedemo is now scheduled for February 6, 2009 at 7:00pm. It is free (as always), but registration is required so go there and get signed up. There are about 260 open tickets left at this point.
Even though it is free that doesn’t mean you can leave your wallet at home. Intermedia Arts is the host for Minnedemo and they have fallen on some difficult times. There will be an opportunity to donate Intermedia Arts (read more about them) and I think the Minnedemo/Minnebar community should show its support with some donations.
I really enjoyed the last Minnedemo (at the same venue). It is a great chance to connect with a great group of local developers, entrepreneurs and a wide variety of other people – each of them very interesting!
Hope to see you there!
Update (January 25th)
I didn’t do a good enough job looking through my calendar. It turns out we are going to be heading out of town on the morning on February 6th for a ski weekend up north. I’m going to miss this Minnedemo. Bummer. Hope everyone else has a great time!
Minnebar 3
See also Minnebar collection.
Nearly done with tomorrows (errr, todays) Minnebar session materials.
Wow – 50 sets of handouts in full color is $170. Black & White of same, on 100% recycled paper, $27. Pass on color.