Before It Was NOGnet: Years of Standing in the Same Line

I want to start with something unglamorous: standing in a check-in line at a network operator event, phone in one hand, the confirmation email with my QR code buried somewhere in my inbox, the battery already nearly dead, the signal weak the way it usually was in venues like that. Behind me, a line was forming, and it was not a patient one.

This happened more than once. It happened, in slightly different forms, at nearly every event I went to for years, long before I had any interest in building software for the people running them. I was just an attendee. I showed up, sat in sessions, tried to meet people whose work overlapped with mine, and went home. That was the entire relationship.

The registration part alone should have been trivial, and on any single occasion it was. Fill in a short bio, name your company, tick a dietary preference, pick a t-shirt size. Five minutes, maybe less. The problem was never any one form. The problem was that I filled in some close variation of that exact form at every event I attended, and none of it carried over from one to the next. Each registration page had no idea I'd typed nearly the same few sentences about myself into a nearly identical box at some other event, not long before. I was, in effect, reintroducing myself to an industry I already belonged to, one text field at a time.

The door, again

The check-in scramble deserves its own mention, because it happened so reliably. The pattern was always roughly the same: arrive a little later than planned, get in line, realize the message with the QR code is sitting somewhere between a newsletter I never unsubscribed from and a calendar invite from months back, and start scrolling while trying not to hold up the people behind me. Weak signal made it worse. A half-dead phone made it worse still. None of it was anyone's fault. It was just what happened when the one thing I needed, right at that moment, lived buried among a hundred unrelated messages instead of somewhere obvious.

The forms and the door were routine irritations, the kind you forget about within a day. What stuck with me longer was what happened after some of the meetings.

Some events ran a matching tool that paired attendees for short one-on-one slots based on shared interests. Sometimes it was software; sometimes it was just an organizer doing the pairing by hand. Either way, I'd sit down with a stranger for a short face-to-face slot, and the conversation would often be good, occasionally the most useful part of the whole event. We'd find the overlap and talk shop, then usually leave with some loose agreement to follow up on something specific. The event would end, life would resume, and a few months later I'd try to recall who that person even was and come up empty. Not the company, not the follow-up, not even a reliable feeling for what we'd said we'd do next. The meeting had happened. The memory of it hadn't stuck around long enough to be of any use.

Business cards were their own quiet failure mode. Someone would hand one over, or we'd just exchange details out loud and I'd type them into whichever app happened to be open on my phone at that second. From there they tended to disappear, into a pocket or a photo roll I never scrolled back through. By the time I wanted to reach that person again, the information was gone, not in any dramatic sense, just misplaced somewhere I never got around to searching. It usually stayed that way.

None of this made me sit down and decide to build anything, and I want to be honest about that. The tidier version of this story would have me leaving some conference with a notebook full of plans, and that isn't what happened. What happened was slower and less interesting: I kept doing the same small, pointless tasks and kept losing track of the same basic information, event after event, year after year, until the repetition itself started to look less like bad luck and more like a design problem.

I didn't have a name for any of this yet, let alone a plan. I just knew the same few problems kept following me from event to event, wearing themselves into a groove long before I thought about building anything for anyone else. Nothing dramatic came out of it at the time. Just a slowly growing list of small, mundane things I was tired of redoing by hand, one event at a time.