(I started writing this post on Thursday, but ran out of time to finish writing it. I've also decided to start linking to a Work Disclaimer on any MT-related posts).

I feel like I've been in Portland forever. Yesterday (Wednesday) was a huge day for the MindTouch booth on the exhibition floor - everytime I swung by, a bigger and bigger crowd seemed to be forming. Honestly, I don't know how Aaron was managing a demo every five minutes the whole day, seeing as to how most of us were already running on fumes by Wednesday. What I enjoyed most about the demo was watching people's reactions to the software.

Working "in the trenches" in software has an effect of making me blind to the product as a whole - I tend to get caught up in bugs and flaws so I miss the "bigger picture." This MindTouch job is my first "real" job, so I simply don't understand the problem of collaboration - I grew up with wikis and the Internet, so the value of our product isn't as obvious to me as somebody who's had to work with Lotus or Sharepoints for many years. It's really refreshing to know that what I'm working on will have an impact somewhere.

So the summary of Wendesday for MindTouch:

• Release source code for DekiWiki (mediawiki fork) and MT Dream on SourceForge
• Launch opengarden, a community site to help with DekiWiki and Dream - it has a full listing of our bugs and has the most recent stable build of DekiWiki powering the documentation section
• Announce a partnership with Visi for viawiki - which will host DekiWiki for you for FREE (with advertisements and space limitations). Signup only takes two minutes and you've got your own private wiki!

It was, in essence, our coming out party on many different fronts.

Wednesday morning, Urs submitted a story to digg. Pete and I were one of the first to digg it, but we were both talking about how this story would never make it to the front page. Boy, were we wrong. Haiphong (thanks dude) reminded me to check the digg ranking, and I saw we had something like 180 or so diggs by 6pm! I then went to the front page, and there we were! This was such a refresher for our whole team ... that whole evening, everybody would excitedly check the digg score on their kickass cellphones ...

Later on, we got a mention on slashdot as well as a link on the nytimes blog. DekiWikiand Dream both hit SourceForge and we had a solid number of downloads by the first day! (something in the hundreds, I forget it now).

A video interview later went up on Port25 (Microsoft) with Aaron and Steve about MindTouch and its products.

Later that evening was our launch party. I think everybody was in a total daze about the level of success - the level of PR we got was far more than any of us had expected.

I was talking with Steve (our President and CTO) that night, and he said something that I thought was very relevant (paraphrased, because I forget the verbatim quote): "This has all been very odd because everything so far's been easy." This isn't meant to mean that this past week was smooth - there were so many last minute changes to the opengarden site, getting stuff organized, getting the projects up on SF, etc ... but overall for the level of success we got ... it all seemed so easy.

That quote reverberated with me because looking back over the past year working on DekiWiki, we've had a long struggle getting the product looking like what it is now (I'll post some more about the UI changes over time in a later post), but nothing seemed hard. For me, I always assume there's some extra X-factor that you can't control which serves as a 'hump' you have to get over (like activation energy in chemistry) to become 'successful.' I think it's premature right now to say that MT is a success - we still have a long ways to go in making the product much better, but for the first time (in a long time), I'm really excited.

Seeing everybody in person was absolutely fantastic. Remember that I work from home, meaning I have no "human" contact with the other guys in our company. Finally putting a face and getting to know these guys personally was an absolute blessing...

The absolutely cool part of all of this is that everybody (I mean, everybody) in the company is absolutely cool. I could get along with everybody in the company on a personal level. By Tuesday, I had loosened up and started joking around with them (not an easy task - I'm a stonewall when it comes to new people). What's even cooler is that all these guys are brilliant. I've long held a disdain for overly intellectual people (people who are smart, know it, and shove it in your face) - this is probably why I dislike anything academia-related so much. The guys in our company all know a lot about their own areas, work their asses off, and are all really personable (in person). Even though our company is really fragmented geographically, there's a really strong sense of unity in making everything about MT much better.

I got to talk with different members of the company and catch up on what they do for MT ... because I work on the dev side of things, I don't get to talk much about the business side of things ... it was great to see how things were progressing along those fronts and to get an idea of where MT was headed over the next few months.

So to Corey (check out his URL, it's hilarious) , Pete, Aaron, Mark, Doug, Tom, Urs and Steve: it was great meeting you guys in person and seeing the company together in one place for once!