Places or people? People or places? Either/or? Or both/and?
We’ve tried as much as possible to make this trip a both/and. We’ve enjoyed seeing the natural beauty of this country - but have equally enjoyed being able to meet friends, family and business peers as we’ve traveled around.
Our Minneapolis stop was all about people. We got into town on a Sunday after some long driving days - we did this on purpose to give ourselves a couple of down days to catch up on work, laundry and life. We found a nice county park nestled in the Minneapolis suburbs and close to the Minnesota Zoo and the Mall of America, neither of which we really wanted to see.
We set aside an entire day for our people visit and started by a tour of the EngineHosting data center by owner Nevin Lyne. I’ve been using them for web hosting for 9-ish years and while I’ve managed to share a beer with Nevin at different industry events this is the first time I’ve been able to see the facilities he runs. I was also able to visit the machines on which my websites actually live (may sound odd, but just interesting to a geek).
Nevin treated us to lunch at his favorite Irish Pub - getting us there mostly by walking through the Minneapolis Skyway System which links together 69 city blocks for a total enclosed distance of over 7 miles. Being from Michigan we’re no strangers to snow and cold weather so it was interesting to us how the city adapted to the colder temps than we see on the East side of Lake Michigan. I’m not sure I could work & live in that system on a daily basis as it felt a bit like a human version of the gerbil systems with it’s connected rooms and tubes. It did seem as if you could stay entirely inside and not eat at the same restaurant twice in the same year.
After lunch we killed some time at a local library and then made our way to The Nerdary for an ExpressionEngine meetup. EE developer Brian Litzinger was our host there, touring us through the facilities. Miranda was especially taken with the idea that there were places to work that would provide breakfast, popcorn & pop while also letting you bring your dog to work. Her only comment was “Too bad it’s just web design…”.
For some reason I didn’t think to snap any pictures at the Nerdary - but we had a nice time getting caught up on email and meeting Brian and the other EE developers both from the Nerdary and surrounding Minneapolis area. They are definitely poking, pushing and prodding EE in different ways to make sure it makes clients happy!
That floor fan in the second photo must be keeping the Train-ee server cool.