This Friday one of the longest running tech meetups in South Florida celebrates it’s 10th anniversary: Refresh Miami. As it should be, the celebration is going to be a fantastic event with good food, music, and networking.
I wanted to take this very brief opportunity to congratulate the past and current organizers of Refresh Miami, particularly Alex de Carvalho, Brian Breslin, and Peter Martinez – all three I know personally.
Therefore, after recently announcing the 9th WordCamp Miami (coming March 24-26… looking for speakers and sponsors btw), I wanted to also thank Refresh Miami for the inspiration for two things:
1) Inspiring me to join meetups and eventually take over operations of the local WordPress meetups, which have grown with much success and now we have two meetups in Broward and Dade/Miami. Refresh Miami was one of the first meetups I ever attended, and seeing it operate got me to follow some of their examples with my own meetups.
2) While i think WordCamp Miami would have started on it’s own, I will gladly admit that without Refresh Miami it probably would have taken longer to get it started. WordCamp Miami started w/ BarCamp Miami, that’s true – but it’s a chain reaction. Without the meetups, the WordCamp wouldn’t have followed. And again, like I said, Refresh Miami inspired me to get the WordPress meetups in shape.
Sadly I miss Refresh Lauderdale – which existed for a year or two in Broward and was easier to travel too. And I also don’t get to Refresh Miami much anymore due to my busy schedule and me living about an hour away with traffic. I’ll watch videos and live streams when they exist. I’ve seen Refresh Miami grow from a dozen or so people in a room of some business to much bigger venues with a bigger budget and national speakers. Sadly I miss the days the topics were more on tech and development – a few years ago the shift of the meeting went mostly to startups, funding, etc. But there are other meetups and conferences that I think have picked up the slack… including WordCamp Miami.
Refresh Miami has also been one of the biggest supporters of WordCamp Miami over the years.
I raise my glass to Refresh Miami and here’s to another 10 years.