On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 14:20:08 UTC, Nicholas Wilson
wrote:
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 10:59:32 UTC, Joakim wrote:
You say that like some superior technology exists to replace
the conference.
It does, read the first link I gave in my first post above.
You mean the one that says "I don’t know how to fix
conferences"?
Yes, obviously that would be the one that explains that superior
online tech is what's killing the conference, before he tries to
think of some way to keep the good parts around, as I'm doing too.
Yes, DConf may benefit from tutorials, workshops, BoFs,
whatever, but the value it brings to the community is very
real.
It may bring some value, but that's not the question: the
question is whether we could get more value out of the
alternatives, particularly at a cheaper cost? The fact that
you and others keep avoiding this question suggests you know
the answer.
That really depends on the objective function you mean by "more
value".
"social networks, Slack groups, podcasts, and YouTube" are all
well and good but they cannot compare (as in apples to oranges)
to high-bandwidth low latency personal communication with all
the people that have an interest (business, technical,
whatever) and technical expertise in the subject at hand.
Huh, that's funny, because that's exactly what all my and Adam's
suggestions are geared around: spending valuable in-person time
communicating in "high-bandwidth low latency," rather than the
low-bandwidth, outdated in-person talk format that is done much
better online. It's almost like you agree with me. :)
Hardly. IME there are two kinds of conferences (or maybe they
form a spectrum, whatever) academic and industrial. Academic
is going nowhere, research needs presenting, organisation of
collaboration needs to happen.
Research conferences are irrelevant. I don't pay attention to
them and the fact that the Haskell link Atila gave above says
their conferences are for presenting research is one big
reason why almost nobody uses that PL in industry.
I concede that I find PL theory useless, but not all academic
conferences are PL theory, and I don't think that the potential
scope for more academic talks of DConf is limited to PL theory.
Novel applications of D in anything from physics to
bioinformatics to optimisations based on immutability to DSELs
enabled by D's meta programming are all possible in an academic
setting.
Sure, academic applications of D might be interesting, but that
and most any talk would be better pre-recorded and watched at
home. The only exception would be panels that require audience
interaction, which is why I called those out in the linked forum
thread.
Industrial, there is project coordination, employment
prospectus, business opportunities, why do you think
companies sponsor conferences? They get their moneys worth
out of it.
Clearly not in the iOS community, and according to a commenter
in my second link above, the Javascript community in his
country, as the number of tech conferences is going down a
lot. It is my impression that this is true across the board
for pretty much every tech community, but I presented that iOS
link because he actually tallies the evidence.
I don't doubt those numbers and perhaps the other forms of
communication do lessen the need for multiple conferences per
year, but there is a large difference from many to one compared
to one to zero, in person communication cannot be easily
replaced.
It's almost as though you don't understand the Engligh language:
my suggestions are all about having _more_ in-person
communication. Did you even read my suggestions?
Industrial sponsorship is definitely real, take a look at the
side column of http://llvm.org/devmtg/2018-10/ which I went to
and talked to the authors of
https://github.com/wsmoses/Tapir-LLVM for potentially targeting
OpenMP and other parallel runtimes with dcompute, talked to the
people developing the SPIR-V target of LLVM, the list goes on.
I'm going to EuroLLVM (Brussels) to continue those
conversations, followed straight away by ACCU (Bristol) to give
a talk about meta programming with D in the context of
developing and using DCompute. Then a few weeks later I'll be
going to DConf for many reasons but principally to coordinate
development, deal with the gripes that have accumulated. I'll
probably return home via Boston for IWOCL (OpenCL).
Heh, you're a conference junkie. :) I don't understand what your
first statement has to do with anything else you wrote: what
"industrial sponsorship" came out of any of this
conference-hopping? You mention none.
In any case, all my suggestions are about increasing outreach and
communication, which would hopefully lead to _more_ such
sponsorship.
Perhaps you as an individual believe that they are not cost
effective for you, fine.
As I keep repeating, this is not about me. I'm pointing out
trends for _most_ devs,
DConf has been growing in size every year it has been held, as
have IWOCL and the LLVM conferences.
Has it? I don't see any official numbers, but this year's DConf
eye-balled smaller to me on the videos.
I'm sure some topics for some conferences are declining, it may
well even be an industry wide trend, but I'd bet good money
that the new equilibrium will have conferences as a staple.
Perhaps, but not with the outdated format D currently follows.
my own preferences are irrelevant.
I certainly hope not.
Of course it is. Just as Walter shouldn't be making decisions
based on what he "enjoys," I shouldn't either. Significant
attention should be paid to what the majority of the audience
wants, which is why it is important to pay attention to data like
that which I presented, that shows conference attendance and
events significantly declining.
But consider that the foundation reimburses speakers and I
personally would be very interested to hear what you have
been doing with Andoird/ARM and I'm sure many others would as
well, the question becomes: is it worth your time?
I don't understand what's so special about "speakers" that it
couldn't simply reimburse non-speakers that the foundation
wants at one of the decentralized locations instead. It seems
like the talk is a made-up excuse to pay for some members of
the core team to come, when the real reason is to collaborate
with them. Why not dispense with that subterfuge?
The talks together with the topic of the conference are what
draw people to the conference and make it economically viable.
It is a perfectly rational decision. If I was running a
conference trying to turn a profit I'd probably get more
applications for the available speaker slots => better quality
speakers => more attendees => $$$.
This is a giant assumption, that those blog posts explicitly call
out as not holding anymore, now that most of those speakers
already get their message out easily online.
DCompute would not exist were it not for that reimbursement, as
a poor student that made the difference between this is
something I can work towards, afford to go to and get good
value out of vs not. Perhaps we could run general travel grants
like LLVM does but I don't think we're large enough for that,
Mike Parker would be the person to talk to about that. But if,
like me, they are students and wan't to have something to talk
about to aid in networking, then giving a talk will help with
that.
Then have them do a pre-recorded talk like every other speaker,
pick some strong contributors to attend every year as you're
already doing, but don't have them talk, and spend all that
valuable in-person time actually networking, doing BoF, getting
things done.
I see little value in a full talk about a port to a new
platform like Android, that is basically another linux distro
with a different libc. It's not a matter of my time, I don't
think it's worth the audience's time. I wish those organizing
DConf would focus on that more.
You can choose the length of the talk you think would fit the
topic.
It _might_ make sense for a 5-15 min. lightning talk.
You could cover the basics of using the port for developing
Android apps
Trivial and available on the wiki, no need.
the difficulties you experienced doing the port
A port is all about fixing a ton of one-off incompatibilities,
that is the recipe for a bad talk. It could be used as a
launching point for a much larger exploration of the platform
itself- say Walter using his DWARF port as a launching point to
talk about the DWARF format and such debug formats generally- but
I don't know enough about Android to do that, nor would it really
make sense at DConf.
and the troubles others might have in doing their own,
Kai gave an excellent, general version of this talk already,
there's nothing substantive I could add to it other than a bit
more technical detail of how it applied to my port:
https://dconf.org/2016/talks/nacke.html
I wish it had been available when I started my port three years
earlier!
... as they say, the stage is yours. It would also present an
opportunity to convince others of the direction you think we
should be going in e.g. w.r.t mobile/ARM/AArch64.
I thought about submitting that as a topic last year, but it's
better done on the forum, as I've been doing.
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 15:32:41 UTC, Iain Buclaw wrote:
On Sun, 23 Dec 2018 at 16:05, Joakim via Digitalmars-d-announce
<digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
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.
No one is interested in watching pre-recorded talks.
Let's look at the numbers. There were around 100 people at DConf
this year? Youtube reports 875 views for Andrei's keynote after
being recorded and put online:
https://youtu.be/-0jcE9B5kjs
I don't know if Youtube counts 1-minute skims as a view, but we
don't know how many people at DConf zoned out and checked their
email during talks either. ;) I see only one DConf 2018 talk that
has less than a hundred views, so we pretty much know that
there's a _lot more_ interest for the talks when _recorded and
put online_.
I think I've said this before regarding the failed experiment
at GHM.
As I recall, you mentioned some conf where they watched
pre-recorded talks in-person _at the conf_ in the linked forum
thread above, while you quote me here saying "pre-recorded talks
watched at home," so I'm not sure what connection you see. As I
pointed out in that thread, that experiment would be heaping
stupid on top of stupid, as you're then wasting the in-person
time even more by collectively watching a static, pre-recorded
format.
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.
Nope, I reckon I'm of your generation, and even I don't
understand you. :-)
If you don't like human interaction, that's your problem.
Perhaps the reason you don't understand is a lack of reading
comprehension, as all my suggestions are to further _more_ human
interaction. I think this may mark two dozen times I've had to
reiterate this point, to about a dozen people on this forum. I
know reading comprehension by programmers is supposed to be very
bad, but these threads really paint a dismal picture.
Don't tell others that they shouldn't meet up once yearly to
talk about subjects that interests them greatly.
Don't lie that I'm telling others what to do.
Meanwhile, I'll be having fun at Dconf next year...
Great, all while D falls further behind. I guess you having a
nice vacation is more important.
On Sunday, 23 December 2018 at 22:36:05 UTC, Steven Schveighoffer
wrote:
On 12/22/18 12:22 PM, Joakim wrote:
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 17:13:06 UTC, Mike Parker
wrote:
On Saturday, 22 December 2018 at 16:57:10 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I'm not trying to discuss it with you or the community. I'm
asking the D team who're making this decision why it's being
made, despite all the reasoning in that thread, and
reiterating that it's a bad move. I suspect they're not
thinking this through, but they can speak for themselves.
The decision was made because your reasoning failed to
convince anyone involved in the planning that maintaining the
current format of DConf is a mistake. Nor do they agree with
you that it's a bad move. We like the current format and see
no need to change it at this time.
I see, so you admit no reasoning was involved on your part?
Because you present none, either there or here.
Huh? It's their decision, not yours. Even if the decision has
no reason at all, it's still theirs. What is the problem? Start
your own D "conference competitor" if you think you can do
better.
They are accountable to the community, so the decision and its
reasons matter. I, for one, will not be donating to the
foundation as long as they continue to waste money this way, just
as others have said they won't donate as long as it doesn't put
out a Vision document anymore or otherwise communicate what it's
doing with their money.
If you would like to carry on another debate about this,
please open another thread in thhe General forum. This one
isn't the place for it. Thanks!
As I just noted, I don't care to "debate" it with people who
make no arguments. Instead, I'm asking you or whoever made
this horrible decision why it's being made.
Nobody cares to debate something that has already been
scheduled and planned, the time to bring up concerns was
earlier, when you brought it up before. But that failed to
convince, now it's decided, time to move on.
So you agree with me that there's no point in "debating" it
again, perhaps you should have addressed this comment to Mike
then?
If it's such a great idea, that should be an easy case to
make, compared to the alternatives given. Yet all I get is a
bunch of stone-walling, suggesting no reasoning was actually
involved, just blindly aping others and the past.
It is easy, for those who have attended conferences and like
them -- they work well. All past dconfs are shining examples.
Just drop it and move on to something else. You lost the battle
for this one, it's no longer up for discussion.
Heh, there was no "battle," as most of those responding didn't
even understand what I wrote, like Iain above, gave no arguments
(we "like them -- they work well"), and as finally clear from
Mike and Walter's responses here, there was no real deliberation
on the matter.
Since they don't take DConf seriously, I see no reason to either:
I'll just start ignoring it from now on.
