On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 14:52:45 UTC, Joakim wrote:
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 12:13:09 UTC, 鲜卑拓跋枫 wrote:
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 10:50:52 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I coincidentally just read this blog post, that summarizes a
lot of my thoughts against conferences and meetups:
https://marco.org/2018/01/17/end-of-conference-era
Maybe a good first step would be a mostly online DConf geared
towards Asian timezones? I could help out with arranging
those online talks.
It seems that people in different countries of Asia may live
in different timezone.
So do people in US and Europe, the vast majority of whom
watching the livestream or online videos didn't attend DConf.
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 12:30:49 UTC, Mike Parker wrote:
On Friday, 29 June 2018 at 11:54:48 UTC, Joakim wrote:
I don't, I think it would be a huge improvement. There are
very few benefits to getting people together in person in our
hyperconnected age, and while "key developers in the same
place" may be one of those, that excludes almost everybody
else at DConf.
Except it doesn't exclude anyone -- it's not just the key
developers.
First off, I question there's much benefit to even the key devs
beyond communicating through email and video conferencing to
iron things out, as Andrei indicates he does with Walter.
And Jonathan only mentioned the key devs, so that does exclude.
As for everybody else, see below.
Honestly, getting everybody together in a room and having
them stare straight ahead at a speaker is a blindingly stupid
waste of time these days. The only advantage of everybody
being together in a room is the heightened communication
bandwidth, and then you all sit next to each other staring
straight ahead silently. The conference format made sense
when pretty much everybody attending didn't have high-speed
internet and connected video displays decades ago, but they
make no sense now, as that blog post notes.
There are huge benefits to being there in person that extend
beyond the time spent listening to the talks. People
congregate in the lobby after hours, have three meals a day
together, exchange ideas, make new contacts that lead to
collaborations down the line... I wouldn't trade the time I've
spent at the four DConfs I've attended for anything and very
much regret missing the two I couldn't attend.
Then spend all your time doing those things: why waste the
majority of conference time sitting through talks that you
don't bother defending?
Here's what a "conference" in Asia or Europe or wherever should
probably look like in this day and age:
- Have most talks prerecorded by the speaker on their webcam or
smartphone, which produce excellent video these days with not
much fiddling, and have a couple organizers work with them to
get those home-brewed videos up to a certain quality level,
both in content and presentation, before posting them online.
- Once the videos are all up, set up weekend meetups in several
cities in the region, such as Tokyo, Hong Kong, and Bangalore,
where a few livestreamed talks may talk place if some speakers
don't want to spend more time producing a pre-recorded talk,
but most time is spent like the hackathon, discussing various
existing issues from bugzilla in smaller groups or
brainstorming ideas, designs, and libraries for the future.
This is just off the top of my head; I'm sure I'm missing some
small details here and there, as I was coming up with parts of
this as I wrote it, but I estimate it'd be an order of
magnitude more productive than the current conference format
while being vastly cheaper in total cost to all involved. Since
D is not exactly drowning in money, it makes no sense to waste
it on the antiquated conference format. Some American D devs
may complain that they no longer essentially get to go on a
vacation to Berlin or Munich- a paid vacation if their company
compensates for such tech conferences- but that's not our
problem.
Thanks for further clarification.
But there is still some limitation may exist, e.g., as you may
note that
the latest Linaro Connect that held in Hong Kong add a new
special "China Access" for sharing their conference resources
like below:
http://connect.linaro.org/hkg18/resources/#1506759202543-a2113613-2111
I noted it because I am very interested in programming on ARM, so
I hope LDC
(https://github.com/ldc-developers/ldc) could add the support for
AARCH64 as soon as possible:).
