2025 MacAdmins Conference Wrap-Up
I’m currently in the process of flying home after wrapping up the 2025 MacAdmins Conference hosted at the Penn State Conference Center and Hotel in State College, PA. It has truly been a wonderful week of community, learning, meeting new faces, meeting online faces in person for the first time, and catching up with old friends.
As I shared in my earlier post, I was fortunate enough to be awarded the 2025 Community and Conference Grant by the Mac Admins Foundation, which enabled me to attend the conference free of charge and paid for my travel and lodging. I’m still stunned that I was awarded such an honor as this community really means so much to me!
I previously attended this conference all the way back in 2018 when the world was different and I was in a much more junior portion of my IT career. This conference, and larger Mac Admins community, was the spark I needed to start my IT journey. I landed a job through someone I met in the Mac Admins Slack!
Because I am now 10+ years into my IT career and at a more senior level, I decided to focus my conference session selection primarily on career growth, mentorship, leadership, avoiding burnout, and focusing towards the future. All of my sessions were truly solid and I walked away with at least a handful of things I could put to use next week. I specifically want to shout out a few of my favorites that I attended as they should be up on the official MacAdmins Conference YouTube channel in a few weeks:
- Career Management for Admins
- Documentation: A love letter to future you
- Zen and the Art of MacAdmin Mental Maintenance
- Writing the Future: After 10 Years of Mac Admins, What’s Next?
One of the unique things about the MacAdmins Conference I really enjoy is that the conference kicks off with a full-day workshop (at no additional cost, mind you), so you can deep dive on a subject of your choosing. I selected “Contributing to Our Community” (excellently led by Anthony, Kelly, and Vaughn ) as I feel I am at a place and time in my journey where I really want to start doing exactly what the workshop title suggests. I walked away feeling so inspired and full of some great ideas to kick-start phase 2.0 of my story arc, if you will.
Another HUGE highlight was getting to connect with completely new, online, and familiar faces (Gandalf: “and what about very old friends?!”). There were so many people that I was finally able to meet face to face for the first time, and it was simply delightful.
I was able to enjoy the conference side by side with Kel, one of my favorite coworkers of all time and someone that grew into a dear friend. We worked together at 2 wild startups from 2018-2022. I learned so much from Kel about empathy, patience, and just being an awesome human being. His presence is infectious, and it had been far too long since we had seen each other in person. It did my heart good to spend almost a week with him.
Oddly enough, Kel and I both worked at the Green Hills Apple Store in Nashville, TN, but not at the same time. Also at this year’s conference were two additional R123 staff that he and I knew, but we all crisscrossed in our retail journeys, and it would be hard and unnecessary to explain the overlaps. Regardless, it was cool to have “multi-generations” of an Apple Store’s employees gathered together, and we spent time laughing over war stories and “did you hear about”’s. It was awesome.
A few other odds and ends:
- The Berkey Creamery remains some of the best tasting and highest value ice cream I’ve ever come across. Every flavor I tried did not disappoint. It’s simply incredible.
- The conference food wasn’t as good as I recall from 2018. Maybe I built it up in my memory?
- The layout, structure, and overall organization of this conference compared to others I’ve attended is simply the best.
- I tried a few off-site restaurants of note in State College (cute, little town by the way). I recommend Kokoro for ramen, and Tasty K for Korean fried chicken.
A heartfelt thank you to the MacAdmins Conference organizing team at Penn State University, the Mac Admin Foundation board, volunteers, and speakers for putting on a “best in class” conference that I can’t recommend enough. Thanks again to the Mac Admin Foundation board for awarding me the grant.
Please donate your time or money to the Mac Admin Foundation if you feel inclined. There are nearly 80,000 members on Slack from every walk of life and in every phase of their journey. I assure you your donation won’t go to waste.
