text stringlengths 0 1.36k |
|---|
Actually, maybe I have an observation that I don't know if it's true... It feels like the actual peak of conferences maybe occurred like two years ago, not now. Does that feel right? I feel like it was almost zero, and then JSConf\_US -- I mean, there was like Ajaxian before that, and some jQuery Camp, things like that... |
**Rachel White:** So what you're saying is the decline of conferences started when I started speaking? \[laughter\] |
**Alex Sexton:** I'm not trying to imply that, I'm trying to directly state it as fact. \[laughter\] No, I feel like there was kind of this explosion of conferences that was non-linear. 2010 was almost zero, and then by 2014 or so you had a ton of city-based conferences, and I feel like a lot of those have fallen off a... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I think that it's definitely getting more specialized... I think there was one year when there was Cascadia and TXJS and JSConf\_US, and now we aren't gonna have Cascadia, we're not gonna have TXJS, we're not gonna have JSConf\_US, there's not gonna be a JSConf\_Iceland... There's only gonna be,... |
**Alex Sexton:** Techlahoma - they're a group. Since we've mentioned Techlahoma, they have like a family of different events. They give constant learning and meetups, as well as... Oklahoma - their conference isn't called Techlahoma, I misspoke, but you can look them up. Sorry, I interrupted your entire thing. |
**Rachel White:** It's okay. I think that it's getting a lot more spread out, and there's not really any -- I mean, it's hard to put on conferences of that scale... I think that the closest that I've been to where I felt that really -- I mean, every conference that I go to is pretty much... They're all really great, bu... |
\[28:05\] I think that there's also a lot more speakers now. People realized, "Hey, people are doing that, I wanna do it too." I mean, that's what I did. I guess this is a good segue into how you can speak at conferences. |
Jenn Schiffer was like, "Hey Rachel, if you wanna speak at conferences, you should just submit a talk", and I did, and it got accepted, so I had to build a robot... And then I spoke at JSConf last call, and it was awesome. I was like "This is fun!" |
I think the best thing about speaking is being able to get people excited about something that they may not have been exposed previously, and inspiring people to try something new, or that they are capable of doing whatever it is that you're talking about. I think that there's this weird stigma that people that speak a... |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, I agree. I also got into speaking via just the open section of conferences, where you don't even submit a talk... It wasn't a five-minute or lightning talk, but I think it was like a 15-minute style, just... People sign up throughout the whole day, it's a third track, and I think if you wanna get... |
I have a game I like to play - speak/attend/stream. We'll say three conferences - which one would you attend, and which one would you stream? |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh yeah, good play. |
**Alex Sexton:** Mikeal, you're up. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Well, you gotta throw the conferences at me, right? |
**Alex Sexton:** Oh, I have to give you the three conferences? Okay... \[laughter\] Ajaxian 2009, the second Pirate Themes JSConf, and TXJS 2015. \[laughter\] |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Oh, let me see here... |
**Rachel White:** This is a horrible game... |
**Alex Sexton:** So you're not interested... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So attend would be TXJS, because I'd like to just relax and enjoy Austin and not have to give a talk. Speaking would definitely be the early JSConf's, because there were just a lot of perks of being a speaker back then, even more than today probably. And stream - Ajaxian, because who gives a what...? |
**Alex Sexton:** That was the only conference, that was the jam... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** It was huge, though... The difference between in a thousand-person conference seeing a talk live and seeing it streamed, it's just not that big. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, but that was the first time you had John Resig, Douglas Crockford, Brendan Eich and one of the Andrew Dupont, all on the same stage, just arguing about frameworks or whatever... |
**Rachel White:** That sounds terrible. |
**Alex Sexton:** Exactly! It was the first time something that terrible existed, which is kind of like a car-wreck situation. I thought it was pretty magical at the time, even though I wouldn't attend it currently. 2009 was a different lay of the land. |
**Rachel White:** I guess somebody asked about non-JS conferences, and I really haven't actually attended many non-JS conferences, so I'm gonna defer to you two. I've heard good things about OSCON and some other things like that, but... |
**Alex Sexton:** \[32:02\] It's a pretty different beast, I think... There are lots of full-stack conferences, and the core language conferences of almost every language are usually pretty great. Ruby has some... I think a lot of the conferences in JavaScript that are great actually kind of stem from the style of confe... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** RubyFringe. |
**Alex Sexton:** Yeah, RubyFringe is kind of where he was like, "Hey, this is a cool model." So I think a lot of the Ruby conferences are really good, as well as some of the full stack conferences. Go has a good conference (GopherCon), and all those things. I think there are lots of good community, and kind of the more... |
**Rachel White:** Yeah, I've heard excellent things about StrangeLoop, which is in St. Louis, and FullStackFest in Barcelona, and RevConf in Virginia, and a bunch of those other ones that don't really focus on any specific language. |
I think that you can get a lot more interesting hybrids of talks when you have that kind of balance, even though I don't know, because I haven't gone to any... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So I would say that there's really kind of two classes of conferences that you really have to look at and treat differently. One is the community conferences that we've been talking about, which - the whole JSConf family is really like "developers in the developer community decide that they wanna do ... |
Then there are really huge events that are run usually by media companies... |
**Rachel White:** Like the O'Reilly ones... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** Or by Google, or somebody like that. They're very, very different, and if you're thinking about speaking, I would say that speaking at an O'Reilly event is more likely to maybe get you a job or to talk to people that will hire you, potentially, than a 200-300-person community event. But if you're loo... |
Now they don't sponsor a lot of the smaller events because there are these bigger events that are willing to give them a booth. We don't have booths at these conferences. |
**Rachel White:** You know what? The bigger events are - hold on, get ready whoever is editing this; I don't know if this is a word I'm allowed to say... They're like such a circle-jerk. It's the same people doing the same stuff at every O'Reilly thing. Sorry, O'Reilly, just saying... If they're recorded, how are they ... |
**Alex Sexton:** I have some answers to that, having participated in some of that... So when a ticket costs a grand, people are not paying for the tickets. I think that is a fundamental reason why the audiences are very different at the two different conferences - it's people who often put up their own money to attend ... |
\[35:56\] So if you're gonna send someone to a conference, you wanna send them to the most reputable one that you can find, and O'Reilly is a very reputable name in tech education. There are very big names on that ticket. And of course, those people give the same talk every time, because you can't give 300 different ta... |
So I think you end up with an audience that cares a little less because they're not invested, which isn't to say that there aren't tons and tons of people who care a whole bunch in those places... But I think the environment becomes different because it isn't a bunch of people who are necessarily all on the same page. |
I want to be very clear that it's fine if you're a developer who goes to work, programs, isn't interested in spending all your own money in going to a conference, and just go do the things that you love more. I think it's perfectly acceptable and good to have the wide gamut. But I think one of the reasons the community... |
**Mikeal Rogers:** "And I wanna meet these people..." |
**Alex Sexton:** Right, yeah. |
**Rachel White:** And I guess you're gonna get exposed to more passionate talks, versus pitchy talks, so that makes sense. I'm a jerk. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** I'll also say that you would think that a thousand dollars for a ticket, and in some cases the O'Reilly events have like $100,000 for the Platinum membership as well... You would think that they were just raking in money and that's why a lot of the quality was really low, but on the organizing side, ... |
Once you get to the size that like a Google Next is, where there's 10,000 people, those sandwiches cost $40, and they're terrible... And there's just no way out of it. You're locked into it because there's only three places on the West Coast that can hold you, and they know that they have you over a barrel. |
So a lot of what we're talking about for the quality being higher for the smaller side is a lot of the funding side of it too, where you can make a lot better choices. If you do a 200-300-person event in Portland, you can get the greatest food in the whole world brought to the event. It's so good! But if you do a thous... |
**Rachel White:** Dinosaur.js did something pretty awesome last year for food, where they just rented a bunch of food trucks and had everybody walk to a big park, and it was nice. But that's a smaller community conference, so that's where you get that. |
**Alex Sexton:** So if I had one piece of advice for conference organizers around food is be VERY careful of food trucks. Pretty much every food truck situation, including Mikeal's first foray into food trucks, ends up with a line that is not gone by the time lunch is over. So you really have to plan either a food truc... |
By far, the majority of food truck situations end up poorly, which is why I have avoided them at TXJS. Even though food trucks are delicious and it's a really good idea, it's very hard to manage. So if you're running a conference, be very aware of that problem. |
**Mikeal Rogers:** So here's the tip - you have to find a food truck that also does catering. So if they say specifically that they also do catering, they don't just come and park there, then in their prep kitchen they know how to make a ton of something and then show up with all of it and everybody can eat right away. |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.