DevDays 2011 is Cancelled

http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/devdays-2011-is-cancelled/

by nsoonhui • 15 years ago

165 53 15 years ago

blog.stackoverflow.com

chunkyslink• 15 years ago

Nice to see Mr Spolsky taking it on the chin and not making excuses.

I would be interested in seeing an online version of any of the presentations. Pretty please ?

mathattack3• 15 years ago

Agree on taking responsibility. There are a lot of excuses he could have made: economy, bad PR firm, etc. By taking blame he can now move on to fix things.

wisty• 15 years ago

Also note, this is a perfect response in a PR crisis - taking responsibility (if not legal responsibility), and not behaving like it's everyone else's fault but your own.

pbiggar2• 15 years ago

I confess I don't understand this mentality. Why do you personally care that Joel took responsibility?

alphabeat• 15 years ago

I'm confused. Didn't he put the blame on poor attendance?

zachallaun• 15 years ago

I'm confused. Did you read just the first sentence?

The second: It’s my fault, actually. Followed by an entire post re: errors made in planning DevDays '11.

garydevenay• 15 years ago

I agree. Would have loved to have went to the '09 conference though.

HeyLaughingBoy• 15 years ago

@spolsky: I guess you've really taken the locksmith lesson to heart then :-)

rodh257• 15 years ago

I'd love to see an online conference like http://www.mvcconf.com/ with the speakers who were signed up giving their prepared talks

damncabbage3• 15 years ago

It's sad, but the price really did kill it for me.

I've only ever been to a conference on my employer's dime once. $500 is a big gamble for me.

(I understand that companies sending devs to conferences seems to be the Done Thing in the States, but I haven't seen it happen too often in Sydney here.)

zdw• 15 years ago

I love short, vigorous conferences. You get great ideas, and go home feeling energized and ready to try a bunch of new stuff you just learned.

Going to longer conferences (like WWDC, etc.) ends up causing brain fatigue after 3rd day of 5 - it's like the Gary Larson "Can I be excused? My brain is full" Far Side comic.

Also, the "hallway track" is what I get the most out of - conferences that optimize for that by offering meals and communal events on-site maximize this.

teej• 15 years ago

Sounds like a classic case of premature scaling. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of...

archangel_one• 15 years ago

I would have much preferred a $99 conference; I saw the announcement of this year's one and was seriously thinking of attending since I was likely to be geographically nearby this time, but $499 was really a bit much for me. I can drop $99 for a one-off day out, but $499 really seems like you need a company paying your way to it for it to be interesting. I guess this is a big difference between the nature of StackOverflow versus an Oracle Users Conference or similar.

Sounds like one major problem is that they really need Joel at the conferences for a bit of "star power", but he obviously doesn't want to spend half his year flying around to SO conferences. Not easily solved, I guess, but I hope they come up with something.

gecko• 15 years ago

If it were me, needing to be at every location would have been a major factor contributing to this change.

Part of Joel's shtick for DevDays was that he showed how proper project management and source control (via FogBugz and Kiln) could really help a small team. Kiln was brand-new at the time, and was a big part of the demo, so I thankfully had an excuse to do the European DevDays stops to answer questions and do demos.

And it...well, it starts awesome, if you do it right: you get to see a bunch of stuff you've never seen before, you get to fly first-class if you're lucky, and you meet a bunch of brilliant people. And I think Joel really likes speaking; if you feel comfortable talking in front of a crowd, it's awesome to see all those people wanting to hear what you have to say. So in that sense, doing a pile of small DevDays is absolutely wonderful, in my opinion.

But then there's dealing with the fact that almost no venue was properly set up properly. That supplies we badly needed didn't ever quite manage to get where they needed to be in a timely manner (or, in the case of Europe, clear customs at all). That a major prop we had was going to have to be driven around London in a truck by yours truly. That we had to have SSDs FedEx'd at tremendous cost because the laptops couldn't comfortably run VMware properly, and that sometimes, it didn't really matter anyway, because something would go wrong with the projector, and you'd end up being forced to use large televisions instead. Or a speaker would cancel and be replaced at the last second by someone else, or the WiFi would just not be there even though it was absolutely required for someone's demo, or half a dozen other things. And that's just the stuff that goes wrong at the time; you're leaving out all the stuff that had to be planned beforehand.

This wore on me, and I only had just a few stops. And Joel (and I) did it two years in a row: DevDays first, and the Fog Creek World Tour second. I have to imagine it wore on him, and I think that might go a long way toward explaining why he tried to consolidate the conferences.

But Joel does love travel, and I think DevDays were absolutely wonderful conferences, so that may have absolutely nothing to do with it. I think it may just be as simple as what he wrote in the post: that they tried to make it bigger and more conference-like...which in turn, made it Not Really DevDays, at which point it was competing with things like OSCON and Open Source Bridge. That's a tougher market.

AgentConundrum• 15 years ago

DevDays 2.0 really seemed to be out of touch with the original DevDays concept.

As Joel says in the post, $99 was a good amount for someone to be able to just take a day off work and pay for the conference themselves. Had I not lost my job in mid-2009, I was seriously considering attending the one in Toronto. I could have planned a trip home at the same time, and just stopped over in Toronto rather than immediately grabbing a second - considerably smaller - plane the rest of the way.

Even had there been a DevDays Toronto again this time, it would have been out of my price range to attend, and it would have meant finding accommodations for a night and all that goes with that. I couldn't have justified it to myself at all.

Good on Joel, though, for straight-up admitting to the problems with the new conferences, rather than manufacturing excuses.

logjam2• 15 years ago

I must be out of touch. A price increase of $99 to $499 is not a "modest increase". Come on.

damncabbage3• 15 years ago

I think he was being facetious.

georgemcbay2• 15 years ago

I hope he was, but I'm not certain he was. In any case, I can assure everyone out there who doesn't vacation in the Hamptons that a jump from $99 to $499 is an absolutely huge difference, both practically and psychologically.

I'm not sure how he couldn't have predicted this outcome.

logjam2• 15 years ago

No, he wasn't. And as numerous people above pointed out, the price killed the deal.

aherlambang• 15 years ago

Someone should probably do a startup that solves the problem of "overpriced" conferences. This has always been a problem for me when wanting to attend a conferences, first comes the plane ticket, then hotel, and then the conference ticket itself (which sometimes is ridiculously high).

SoftwareMaven2• 15 years ago

The problem of "overpriced" conferences is that conferences are really expensive to put on. Everything from from the location to the food costs a lot, and every place has it's particular rules about what you are allowed to bring in versus what they force you to use. And then you have to pay speakers...

We are just putting the finishing touches on ProductCamp Utah, and with no profit and no paid speakers, it is still extremely expensive.

eschaton2• 15 years ago

There's a large number of experienced conference runners and planners who will disagree, and collectively have been running inexpensive but good conferences for DECADES.

They're called "SMOFs." They run science fiction conventions. (Not "Star Trek" conventions but "science fiction" conventions - books.) And the conventions are not for profit membership organizations typically with hundreds or thousands of members attending over a weekend at a cost of a few tens of dollars each.

The SMOFs are generally willing to help others run conferences by giving them advice, doing (paid) consulting work, or even fully (paid) managing conferences. A great example is Expotech, who ran MacHack.

eschaton2• 15 years ago

Oh yeah, and if you're paying speakers, You're Doing It Wrong. The speakers should be drawn from the attendees/members.

If a speaker is a "guest of honor" (say a major keynote) you should comp them their conference membership, and possibly cover their hotel room and travel (which you'd arrange). That's it.

No paid speakers. No "sponsors," either. Just members. Hundreds of conventions with a great many thousands upon thousands (potentially millions) of members make this work every year in sci-fi and the areas that have branched off from it like anime and comics.

simonw• 15 years ago

Have you been to a BarCamp? They're usually free to attend, they happen all around the world (so you hopefully don't have to travel too far) and the quality of the sessions can be incredibly high.

mgkimsal• 15 years ago

They can be incredibly high. I've found our local barcamps to have been a mixed bag, and it really depended on the quality of the people who showed up that day. They used to run it where everyone pitched during the morning, then self organized around the pitched sessions. That made the sessions totally up in the air - you had no idea when you woke up if it was even worth showing up. Later ones set up early pitching/voting on the web, which seemed to help some, but because there was no ticket cost, the organizers were still on the hook trying to determine food cost and such in advance, when just a little bad weather might keep away loads of people.

The area ncdevcon.com (next week in Raleigh) started charging for tickets this year - a nominal $60 for 2 days - precisely because when it was free, people wouldn't show up on the day because they had no real investment.

For indieconf.com, we've charged - both for last year's even and this year's event - and are posting speakers/sessions well in advance so people know what they're getting.

There's room for all styles of events, certainly, and perhaps I have bit more invested emotionally than others, being an organizer myself, but the barcamp self-organizing doesn't always produce great results. This may also have something to do with geography as well, but I don't think anyone's done an actual study of barcamp attendee satisfaction around the globe. Maybe that's something you could add to lanyrd :)

mirkules2• 15 years ago

I have never heard of this event until now. I would love to attend something like this. How/where was this event marketed?

Also, $99 sounds like a great price entry point. Defcon started out on the cheap, and a few years later spawned BlackHat. Sounds like a good model to follow.

tptacek• 15 years ago

Defcon: single location, labor of love (staffed by volunteers), uncompensated speakers.

Black Hat: 4 locations?, 4-figure attendance fee, significant speaker compensation, significant full-time paid staff.

It took several years of Defcon before Jeff could start Black Hat and go full time to build it.

mirkules2• 15 years ago

Exactly. It's actually great that DevDays was able to charge only $99 AND compensate speakers and workers+! It actually means they one-upped Defcon in that regard.

BlackHat-caliber conferences, as you imply, will come over time as Defcon-caliber conferences explode in popularity.

Again, I know next to nothing about DevDays, and I could be totally off the mark. But it seems to me, like others pointed out, Joel tried to do too much too quickly. Jeff would have had a tough time getting BH off the ground after just two years of DC.

+My assumption here is that by stating Defcon was NOT able to do these things, DevDays was. Sorry if I misunderstood that.

m0nastic• 15 years ago

If you're curious around the financials of running a conference (albeit a security conference), I highly recommend the following video from Shmoocon 2011‡

They go over all the associated costs of putting on the conference as well as revenue.

‡ http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/12351458

kevinherron• 15 years ago

Price killed it for me too.

I felt like it was a no-brainer to go to the 1-day $99 DevDays in SF. When I saw the price and duration of this year's event I didn't event want to ask.

SteveJS• 15 years ago

Oddly enough there is another way to go. Cheap and a different city. The Lindy Hop community set up a web site to have exchanges back before 2000.

http://lindyexchange.com/

It caught on and has been going ever since.

Every weekend of every month there is a city throwing an exchange. You can go and stay on the cheap as people volunteer to host, and there is always incredible dancing at exchanges.

It's closer to vacation/meetup. Of course ... Swing dancing is inherently a party.

EugeneG• 15 years ago

Could this be the consequence of fewer updates to Joel on Software? Less pull with the community?

flocial• 15 years ago

If it's community interaction you seek it's hard to beat GitHub drink ups on this one. Drink beers with founders anywhere they go in the world.

theshadow• 15 years ago

What has this got to with the concept of DevDays other than blatant fanboyism and a plug for github?

nopassrecover• 15 years ago

Tangential, but a good point was made that some people had booked flights and accommodation already. I wonder if they are still deductible if the event is cancelled?

ZipCordManiac• 15 years ago

I don't go to a conference for food, AV, coffee or wifi. I go for the presentations. A jump from 99 to 499 seems excessive...

davweb• 15 years ago

The key difference does seem to be that the jump from $99 to $499 turns DevDays from a conference that you can pay for yourself into one that most people are going to have their employers to pay for.

$499 for a two day conference is pretty cheap but what makes DevDays a hard sell to most managers is that the point of it is that it introduces you to technologies that you're not going be using day to day in your job.

ig1• 15 years ago

BarCamp style conferences have proved it is possible, even in London which is the one of the most expensive city in the world.

rsobers• 15 years ago

I don't think the multi-city approach is necessary. It seems to be more of a headache than anything else. Stack Overflow has a big enough following that they could hold a 2 day conference in SF, LA, Boston, or Seattle and it would likely sell out. It works for RailsConf, PyCon, CodeConf, LessConf, etc., etc.

cookiecaper• 15 years ago

Interesting. I wonder why they didn't just choose to promote the events more aggressively, etc. -- surely Spolsky could have gotten more registrations if he had tried.

I think there is a market for a $499 conference, but perhaps it needs to have a better reputation among management first.

kellysutton• 15 years ago

I went to DevDays in LA in '09 (or '10?). Bummer it's not happening this year.

funkah• 15 years ago

I enjoyed the original $99 one-day conference, I thought it was a great idea. Really didn't care about the crappy wifi, food, or coffee.

scdc• 15 years ago

I agree. Actually, I was at the $99 Washington, DC conference and remember the food, wifi and coffee being fine.

TrevorBurnham• 15 years ago

This is a particularly big disappointment for me: Not only was I scheduled to speak at the London event, but there were to be talks on CoffeeScript in all four locations. While CoffeeScript talks have become de rigeur at Ruby/Rails events, Dev Days presented an opportunity to bring the language to a wider developer community. Plus, the talks were going to deal with more advanced topics than the usual "Here's why you should learn CoffeeScript." My talk was cheekily entitled "CoffeeScript: The Only Language You'll Ever Need"; I was planning to talk about tricks and tools for using CoffeeScript in all walks of life.

Of course, my sympathies go out to the Dev Days planners; this must have been a very hard decision for them, and an understandable one. Consider me RSVP'd for Dev Days 2012.

DevDays 2011 is Cancelled

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