On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 10:07:40 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/22/2018 10:20 PM, Joakim wrote:
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.
Eh, I went pretty far into the DIP 1000 material.
That one had more technical examples, but I didn't think it was
very well-motivated and could probably have had more detail.
My feeling is that you save your best stuff for your NWCPP talks
and present the baby versions at DConf.
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.
It's very different listening to a presentation live rather
than pre-recorded. There are the before and after interactions
they inspire.
I'm not sure how a talk is supposed to inspire anything
substantive _before_ you've heard it, and pre-recorded talks
watched at home would fill the same purpose after.
Perhaps this is a generation gap, as I see that you and Russel
are a couple decades older than me, so let me give my
perspective. I've probably watched a week or two of recorded tech
talks online over the last year, and maybe a couple hours in
person. Invariably, I find myself wishing for a skip-ahead button
on those in-person talks, like I have for the online videos. ;)
I suspect there are many more like me these days than you two.
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.
London is the most cost-effective destination for most D team
members. For distributed meetings, there have been several D
meetups that do what you suggest. While fun and valuable,
they're not a replacement for DConf.
I have never heard of a meetup doing what I suggest, ie an
all-day D event with almost no in-person talks, possibly
co-ordinated with other cities. I think this would be _much
better_ for D than DConf.
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.
If you ever came to one, you might see it differently.
I'm not a member of the core team, so I'm not sure how that's
relevant. If you just mean that I could observe how the core team
is getting a lot of value out of in-person talks, I call BS.
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.
There's a very clear connection between DConf and successful
collaborations with industry and D developers. Why mess with
success?
For the chance of much more success? I'm sure there have been
some fruitful collaborations and hiring at DConf. I'm saying
there would likely be _even more_ with my suggestions.
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.
Your opinions would have more weight if (1) you've ever
attended a DConf
Perhaps but since I haven't been, you could presumably articulate
what you find so great about DConf that contradicts my opinions,
but you mention nothing here and your reasons elsewhere aren't
too worthwhile.
and (2) can point to successful instantiations of your theories.
What do you consider a "theory" above: that you could have better
outreach at several locations or that pre-recorded talks watched
at home are a better use of valuable in-person time? I don't
think that's theorizing, it's well-accepted by most everyone who
knows these subjects.
I started off by pointing to documented evidence of conferences
going down, and popular bloggers and people who track this stuff
talking about how online talks have replaced them, so it is
well-known that this trend away from the old conference format is
underway.
I find it strange that you call documented social trends "my
theories."
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.
People *like* conferences.
Apparently not, or they wouldn't be declining.
You can buy a Led Zeppelin CD or spend $$$$ to see them live
and enjoy it with the crowd. Maybe you'll go backstage and meet
& greet. Which would you rather do?
I'm the wrong person to ask this as I don't listen to music and
so have never been to a popular music concert.
But your question is strange considering all my suggestions are
about having _more_ interpersonal interaction at more locations,
not less.
BTW, another point for the presentations is that we cover the
air fare and hotel expenses for the presenters. Quite a lot of
people have been able to attend because of this. It's our way
of giving a little bit back to strong contributors.
So why not just pay for the strong contributors to come and not
give talks? This reason is completely illogical.
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 11:25:23 UTC, Walter Bright wrote:
On 12/23/2018 2:59 AM, Joakim wrote:
I wish those organizing DConf would focus on that more.
You're free to organize D meetups and conferences as you see
fit. Heck, C++ has many conferences, run by different
organizations with different ideas on how to do it. Nothing
wrong with that.
Even Andrei and I and some others put on our own C++ conference
about 10 years ago.
I have considered doing some kind of online webinar series in the
past. The way I've been spreading the word instead is by giving a
talk introducing D at a handful of local tech meetups organized
by others. When I ask people to raise their hand if they've heard
of D- not tried or used it a lot, mind you, just _heard_ of it- I
think maybe 1% raised their hand. I currently live in a bit of a
technical backwater, but that's not good.
If you look at the total expenditure on DConf as currently
organized, it probably comes to between $100k-300k, if you
include all the travel and hotel costs for everyone. What you
have to consider is the opportunity cost of spending that money
elsewhere, even given that you will only get a fraction of it
otherwise, as for many it's really a vacation or their company's
conference budget footing the bill.
I don't think there's any way the current format, in-person talks
at a central location, even comes close to the alternatives I've
suggested in terms of bang-for-the-buck, whether decentralized
without in-person talks or spending that money on more D interns
like Razvan or Nicholas.
Of course, it's not my money to spend or decide: I've granted
that several times. But such bad decision-making comes across as
severe managerial incompetence to me, which affects me as a
downstream contributor and user.
From your flippant responses to me and aversions on the issues I
raise, I suspect you don't take such non-technical matters very
seriously. I get the sense generally with non-D decisions in this
project that you just want to go the safe, conservative route:
just follow the traditional conference format because it's known,
ignoring the downslide I've highlighted. I don't think D can get
very far that way: you have to take some calculated risks on
non-D matters too, like you did when you went full open-source
with the language.
