175 million people is far more than the number of people who voted in the 2008 US presidential election (131,257,328). It’s far more than the population of Mexico (111,211,789). It is far larger than the nation with the second largest national economy on Earth, Japan(127,530,000). And it’s still growing like crazy. Facebook, of course, is not really comparable to a country, but at some point the size of a community becomes a very important feature.
Next weekend, Kari and I are making our first trip to Dallas, and it’s going to be nerdy. We have, at this point, driven around Dallas on I-35 three times, but we’ve never been through the city itself and we certainly haven’t stopped there. This time, we are specifically targeting the city, and we’ve got three great events planned.
Our first task is to attend the Facebook Developer Garage – Dallas, which is being held in fairly-central Dallas. This will be exciting, as it might be the first developer gathering for a platform I already develop on. There seems to be two tracks, technical and marketing, and I’ll be in the tech track. The business side of Facebook development seems straightforward enough, but technology can usually use additional explanation.Another fun aspect of this event will be getting a chance to see central Dallas. The DFW metro area is pretty spread out and nothing else on this trip will be eve slightly central, so spending some time near downtown should be worthwhile.
On Saturday and Sunday, we’ll be attending WordCamp Dallas 2009 at UT-Dallas. Obviously, WordPress is a platform I use, but I’m not really doing any development with it. Hopefully, this event will help me move from user to developer, even if all I manage to do is tweak a theme or something similar. Also, it seems like there are few, if any, WordCamps in Austin, so I’m hoping this event will pull in more Austin WordPressers than Kari and I. When we get back, I hope to attend some more WordPress events here in Austin and I hope to have met a few people involved in the WordPress meetups around here.
On Sunday night, as we leave Dallas, we’re going to see the Texas Rangers host the San Diego Padres in Arlington, TX. We’ve never been to this ballpark, and it is a minor obsession of ours to visit new ballparks (we’ve only visited one this season, and it was Tulsa’s minor league team’s stadium)[update: Kari pointed out to me after this was posted that we also visited the Portland, OR minor league ballpark this summer], so this is a great way to finish up the trip. This last stop, I guess, isn’t very nerdy, but at least we approach it in a very nerdy way.