A roundup of our "Meet Tito" dinners over the past few months

In September we put out a call to meet us in various cities, starting in Copenhagen when I visited to attend TechBBQ on the 10th September. What followed was a series of dinners that were fun and insightful, and will hopefully continue to be opportunities for us to meet existing and new customers and have a bit of fun along the way.

The Copenhagen dinner was at Pauli, an award-winning restaurant in Sydhavnen. I won’t say that the name didn’t influence my choice, but it’s de-facto a really great restaurant, and was perfect for the informal vibe I was going for. It was great to hang out with Maria from TechBBQ, as well as meeting Mads Kjer from Ticketbutler, a Tito “co-opetitor”. It was cool to hang with Florian from DepFu (we’re happy customers), and Aron Allen who ran CycleJS back in the day, not to mention my good friend Gavin Sheridan from VizLegal.

At the end of the meal, Luka, our delightful host for the evening, mentioned that they would be doing a pop-up in London the week of the 7th October.

This was perfect because I was going to be in town for Intercom’s Pioneer event on the 10th. I immediately booked the Pauli popup in Carousel on the 9th, and we had another fantastic meal. Joining us was Tito investor and PMA CEO, Rich King, as well as Dave LeTorey who organises State of the Browser, along with James Adam, steward of London’s Ruby User Group.

Fast-forward a few weeks, and I attended Haggis Ruby, a regional Ruby event in Edinburgh, the first in 10 years since the last Scottish Ruby Conference, a conference dear to me as one of my earliest speaking opportunities. Haggis Ruby was relatively small, but full of spirit, excellent talks and an all-round good vibe.

Our Edinburgh dinner was at tipo, and since we had slightly higher numbers, we booked “The Pasta Room”, a private room with a sharing style menu. Of all the dinners, this was probably my favourite. 

Having learned about “Jeffersonian-style” dinners from Tom Preston-Werner and Chad Fowler earlier this year at This Next Thing, I was eager to try the format. It’s safe to say that everyone around the table loved it, none of whom had tried it before. It’s a relatively simple contrivance: at various points during the meal, we would pose a question that would be answered by one person talking at a time. It gave everyone a chance to share a bit of themselves with the whole group, and conversely, it gave everyone in the group a chance to hear from everyone round the table.

Joining us in Edinburgh was Tito engineer Bill, Brian Corcoran from TuringFest, Emmeline Caines-Gooby who was at BrightonSEO, Mike McQuaid from HomeBrew / WorkBrew, and a bunch of other new friends from the conference.

Finally, at SmashingConf Antwerp last week, we hosted a small group at V Modern Italian, including Tito founding customer Marc Thiele from Beyond Tellerrand, Mariona from Smashing, and Tim Van Damme, a once-or-twice contributor to some of Tito’s designs (Tim designed the Vito logo). Alas, it was too loud to do Jeffersonian, but we had a very pleasant meal.

SmashingConf Antwerp was our first time ever hosting a sponsor stand at a conference. We had a really good time: we did a run of t-shirts and all of them got taken, so if you see one in the wild, say hello! We also gave away a few prizes: we hosted a small “guess the number of marbles” competition, but instead of marbles, we asked folks to guess how many events in our events database table in the last 7 years (which is the number of years SmashingConf has been using Tito for). Congratulations to (coincidentally) Irish-woman Shaun MacGabhann who was probably the person who was most excited about the Zelda Game and Watch. It couldn’t have gone to a better home. And if anyone’s curious, the correct answer was 82,645, with the nearest guess being 75,010.

Finally, thanks to Smashing for their warm welcome of my 8 year old son who joined me on the trip. Smashing had a remarkably child-friendly Lego table (given there was only one child at the event). Doc sent him over to “do something Tito”, and I warned that my kid would take that literally. Not 15 minutes later did he come back with this Tito logo in Lego blocks. A proud father moment.

Catch you at the next thing!