March 2019 – Erika for President

We had a great day here in Atlanta for the DevNexus Conference. Venkat Subramaniam kicked off the morning with a funny and thoughtful keynote and I have learned so much in all of the presentations I’ve attended.

The organizers outdid themselves on speaker gifts this year – my favorite being the awesome personalized jersey.

The turnout for my 4:00 PM slot impressed me – by 4:00 at a conference like this, my brain is usually beyond full. I appreciated their interest and attentiveness! If the free building block toy giveaways helped at all, W00t!

Several people asked me if I would make the slide deck available. You can view the entire presentation below. If you want a downloadable version, just send me a private message and I’ll make sure you get it.

Since we will be on vacation for our anniversary, we ordered our gift early – a little something to have fun with building up to the trip. I am extremely pleased with the quality of the product and the customer service we got from Conquest Maps.

The sleek, modern look of the map is accentuated by edging that gives the feel like it’s leather-bound. It has canvas stretched over cork on a wooden frame, which makes the map sturdy, without being overly cumbersome to hang (it weighs only around 12 pounds).

If you are hoping to flag every city or state you visit, this is probably not the map you need. Even at the larger 36″ x 24″ the map area detail itself is really more suitable for tracking countries. They do carry a nice United States map for folks interested in tracking states visited.

We found personalization easy enough; however, the wide-open design form field might overwhelm someone without a design background. Once ordered, we had proofs from the company within a day, along with some recommendations, and updates of the changes within another day.

In addition to email updates along the way, we received text messages when our map was shipped, when it was out for delivery, and when it had been delivered. The map came well-packaged and arrived completely damage-free.

The map comes with two different colored blue pins. While pretty, we opted to also purchase three different metallic colored pins that complement the modern look of the map. This will allow us to mark our individual travel before we met and our travel together since. We may pick up one more metallic color to use in planning and marking our future trips. We’ll likely start thinking of where to go on the next big trip during our upcoming vacation.