On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 22:13:44 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/22/2018 6:26 AM, Atila Neves wrote:
If you don't like conferences you don't have to go. I for one
am excited about being in London in May. Please don't sour it
for other who think/feel like I do.
That's right. And hefting a pint with Atila is guaranteed to be
a highlight of the conference! I recommend it for those who
haven't had the pleasure.
I'm sure he's fun to be around, the question is whether it's
worth the cost of flying to London.
That said, I think we've probably tried to cram too many
presentations into the schedule. We should probably have fewer
and put gaps between them for people to digest and talk about
them.
The question is if it's worth doing in-person presentations at
all.
Also, I try to make my presentations less "I lecture and you
listen silently" to be much more interactive and engaging with
you guys. I suggest others planning a presentation to also
think along those lines.
Honestly, yours are routinely the worst presentations at DConf.
Your strength as a presenter is when you dig deeply into a bunch
of technical detail or present some new technical paradigm,
similar to Andrei. Yet, your DConf keynotes usually go the exact
opposite route and go very lightly over not very much at all.
Reading through your listed benefits of DConf below tells me you
didn't read anything I wrote in the linked forum thread above
from months ago, as nowhere did I say not to get people together
in person at all, which is where most of your benefits come from.
Rather, I made three primary suggestions for how to get people
together instead:
1) Ditch in-person presentations for pre-recorded talks that
people watch on their own time. Getting everybody in the same
room in London to silently watch talks together is a horrible
waste, that only made sense before we all had high-speed
internet-connected TVs and smartphones with good cameras. Do a
four-day hackathon instead, ie mostly collaboration, not passive
viewing.
2) Rather than doing a central DConf that most cannot justify
attending, do several locations, eg in the cities the core team
already lives in, like Boston, Seattle, San Jose, Hong Kong, etc.
This makes it cost-effective for many more people to attend, and
since you'll have ditched the in-person tech talks, spend the
time introducing the many more attendees to the language or have
those who already know it work on the language/libraries, ie
something like the current DConf hackathon.
3) Get the core team together as a separate event, either as an
offline retreat or online video conference or both. I know you
guys need to meet once in awhile, but it makes no sense to spend
most of that in-person time at DConf staring at talks that could
be viewed online later.
Some other advantages of DConf off the top of my head, in no
particular order:
1. putting a face and name to the person greatly helps working
with people remotely the rest of the year
Maybe, but only 2) above mitigates it somewhat, and is it worth
the cost?
2. it's amazing how intractable, obstinate online positions
just melt away when discussed in person over a beer
1) and 3) enable that more, 2) sacrifices that for greater
outreach.
3. it's fun to see what other people are doing, as it's easy to
miss what's important by just monitoring the n.g.
1) and 3) enable that more, 2) sacrifices it somewhat.
4. I regard all you folks as my friends, and it's fun to be
with y'all
Is that more important than outreach and getting things done?
5. many, many collaborations have spawned from meeting like
minded individuals at DConf
They still would with the suggestions above, just differently.
6. employers come to DConf looking for D developers, and many D
developers have gotten jobs from them. If that isn't a win-win,
I don't know what is!
While I find it questionable to say that they couldn't easily
find and recruit those people online, given that D is primarly an
online project where most everything and everyone is easily
available online, I see no reason why any of the changes above
would stop that.
It seems clear to me that you, at the very least, have not
engaged with the links and ideas I've been providing about why
the current DConf format is broken.
My fundamental point is that the current DConf conference format
is an outdated relic, that made sense decades ago when getting
everybody together in a room in Berlin was a fantastic way to get
everybody connected. With the ready availability of high-speed
internet and video displays to everybody who can afford to pay
the registration fee and go to London, that hoary conference
format needs to be rethought for the internet age.
I have no problem with anybody disagreeing with my suggestions or
the reasoning behind them, but I find it flabbergasting for
anyone to suggest, as Mike has above, that the old conference
format still makes sense, especially given the documented
evidence of it declining.
D cannot afford to be technically innovative yet lag behind on
everything else, as it once was when you used no version control
or issue tracker for the early years of D. Some thought needs to
be put into these issues I'm pointing out with the current
conference format, yet I don't see it happening.
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 22:15:19 UTC, Walter Bright
wrote:
On 12/22/2018 7:11 AM, Joakim wrote:
I've never been to DConf
I suggest actually attending and seeing for yourself.
I've considered it several times, but could never justify the
cost of flying to Berlin or wherever. I suspect there's many in
my boat, hence 2) above.
