I’ve spent the last few days at Connections ’14, a massive digital marketing conference in Indianapolis centered around the ExactTarget Marketing Cloud. I’ll be honest,  a few months ago when we started working on some internal product activities that would be announced at Connections,  I didn’t know what to expect. How is marketing relevant to developers? And why should they care about Fuel, a core part of the Salesforce1 platform.

But something clicked, and I had one of those rare moments where the light switched on and I saw the huge opty for devs to build apps that become sticky. You know the sort of app I mean; the ones you open a dozen times a day, not because you want to check your news feed, but because your app is talking to you – sending relevant, and contextual updates right to your phone.

To help other devs with that ah-hah moment, we decided to do our first ever developers at Connections event – basically a mini  conference for 800 devs inside a larger marketing conference. What better way to get devs and marketers working together? When I saw this tweet from Laurie Voss, co-founder of NPM, a company and product I admire greatly, that I knew the confluence of app devs and marketing was incredibly important.

For the past two days, we had speakers and seasons covering Node.js, JavaScript, Heroku, Force.com, and the amazing new Journey Builder for Apps product that finally gives developers and marketers the common ‘language’ for them to collaborate to create these engaging apps. Our developer theater was packed from opening to close with a huge mix of attendees.

I think my favorite session was from Matt Creager, followed closely by Kevin Poorman – who also one an Xbox One for completing all 5 mini hacks in a single day.

Although I think the fact that Kevin set himself up right beside the free DevZone Cafe may have had something to do with it.

Whatever the recipe, we had an amazing time at Connections ’14 with some great new stickers, t-shirts, some awesome new workbooks, and books (I was super super excited to co-author the Journey Builder for Apps book with Ian Murdock, VP of Platform Product Management at ExactTarget, and Debian creator – am I dating myself here). Next stop on the journey is Dreamforce next month. Don’t forget to register for the $1,000,000 hackathon, and we will see you there!