Topic: devdays

DevDays has been canceled, due to poor attendance.

It’s my fault, actually. I took a perfectly good thing (DevDays ’09) and gold plated it until it was a different thing.

DevDays ’09 was one day. So even people who couldn’t get their boss to let them go to a conference could take a vacation day or something. Everyone told us “Great conference! Too short!” So version 2.0 had to be longer, we thought. Two days!

Oh, also, DevDays ’09 was $99.  We pulled that off by being cheap. Really cheap. So even people who couldn’t get their boss to pay could afford to spring for the conference themselves. But the cheapness resulted in lousy A/V, bad or non-existent coffee, very rudimentary food (when we had it), no Wi-Fi, and lots of other minor privations. In the grand spirit of 2.0, we decided to make all this stuff better, and to cover the costs by a modest increase in list price from $99 to $499.

Oh, one more thing: DevDays ’09 was in ten different cities. So  lots of people could attend without flying anywhere or getting a hotel room. But the grueling schedule of ten cities was incredibly hard work, so we thought, let’s have bigger conferences in fewer cities.

All this great 2.0 thinking had us building a really amazing conference series. We had great venues, great A/V, great food, insane Wi-fi,  and of course, a schedule of two days of great speakers lined up in each city.

What we didn’t have was an affordable, one-day, painless, no-brainer conference. So registration was surprisingly slow. And we just didn’t get enough people to make it work. Ooops.

I spent 20 years in the software industry where the marginal cost is close to zero and you can always make version 2.0 better without increasing your costs. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it! In the real world, though, $99 conferences are completely different than $499 conferences, and I take full responsibility for screwing up DevDays.

FAQ

Q: I registered anyway. Will I get a refund?

A: Yes, this will happen automatically. If you have any trouble or questions email Alex & Alison at devdays@stackoverflow.com for help.

Q: What about the ServerFault Scalability Conference?

A: That has been canceled, also.

Q: What about the hackathon in Washington, DC?
A: We’ll let you know. We are still planning to hold the Stack Exchange company meeting in Washington, so we will try to organize some public event at the same time.

Q: Why don’t you just scale back to $99, one-day conferences?

A: Unfortunately, the four conferences we planned this year were going to be held at much larger venues and would have cost way too much to put on, so we can’t just trim them back to one day, $99 events.

Q: What are you going to do in the future?

A: We want to work on a much larger number of much smaller events in far more cities, such as meet-ups and individual talks sponsored by Stack Overflow.

This Stack Overflow DevDays will be the best conference you’ll attend in 2011.  You’ll come away with in-depth knowledge of all the latest programming awesome like: Node.js, HTML5, CSS3, CoffeeScript, Cassandra, Hadoop, F#, UI design, Scalability and Performance.  Register today to ensure you won’t miss out on seeing these speakers and more!

San Francisco, October 12-13:

UI Design at Square
Speaker: Tristan O’Tierney
Tristan is a Co-Founder and original iOS Engineer at Square, Inc. Before Square, Tristan worked on Yahoo! Messenger for Mac, Safari, VMware Fusion, Obama ’08 iPhone app, and the first location based twitter client Twinkle at Tapulous. He’s also well known for his online Objective-C tutorial and has enjoyed hacking on projects like FlickrBooth for fun in his spare time.

KHAAAAAN
Speaker: Ben Kamens
Ben works on any Khan Academy code that helps scale the influence of a great teacher. Before joining Khan Academy, Ben spent 5+ years at Fog Creek Software, learning how to build a great development culture from some guy named Joel.

Compilers and Interpreters and JITs, oh my
Speaker: Paul Biggar
Paul works on the Javascript team at Mozilla. Before joining Mozilla, Paul completed a PhD in compiler optimizations, static analyses and dynamic languages, and started a YCombinator startup.

Sydney, 25-26 October:

CSS in a post-IE6 world
Speaker: Chris Darroch
Chris Darroch has a passion for building kick-ass interfaces and user experiences. When he isn’t working on UIs, preaching web development standards and best-practices, or attempting to get his StackOverflow profile over 9000, you might find him vying for glory and epic lewts in World of Warcraft, or playing Guitar Hero on expert.

Finding Your Place in the World: Google Places API
Speaker: Luke Mahe
Luke is part of the Geo Developer Relations team at Google Sydney where he works with developers from all over the world that use the Maps JavaScript and Places API.

Brutal JavaScript: Traps, Hurdles, and Pitfalls
Speaker: Dmitry Baranovskiy
Dmitry has over 10 years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design. He is most notably known as a creator of Raphaël (http://raphaeljs.com) JavaScript vector library.

London, 14-15 November:

When the System is the Software: Operations for Developers
Speaker: Jeff Lawson
Jeff Lawson is CEO and Co-founder of Twilio, the technology company revolutionizing telecommunications with simple tools for programmatically making and receiving text messages and phone calls. Jeff brings over 12 years of entrepreneurial experience with product, engineering and business background to the company.  Jeff was awarded a 2010 TechFollows Award for Disruptive Innovation, and was named as number 18 on Business Insider’s 2010 Silicon Valley Top 100 List. Prior to founding Twilio, Jeff held founding executive roles for NineStar, Stubhub.com, and Versity.com.

NoSQL in the Enterprise
Speaker: Julian Browne

Julian is Chief Architect at Equal Experts, a convivial services and consulting company that blends XP engineering practices with pragmatic designs. Despite longstanding frustrations with architecture practices in large companies, he finds his CV is full of architecture roles in large companies, mostly in the mobile and investment banking sectors. His mission in life is to make enterprise architecture the basis for developers to just make the magic happen. He codes and has never seen an ivory tower, let alone been up one.

The Combinator Approach to Creating Domain Specific Languages with F#
Speaker: Robert Pickering
Robert is a fun loving programmer who claims that he is Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints. He enjoys travelling round Europe in a big shirt trying to teach people that real programmers use the stack. Robert is a big fan of functional programming and F#. He works for the ultra cool French consultancy Infinite Square and he lives in a quaint French village near Paris with his wife and their three cats. He considering writing a book about life in France as a programmer, as given the success of “Year in Provence”, it would probably sell a lot more that his last effort, “Beginning F#”.

Washington DC, December 15 & 16:

iPhone/iPad/Android Development
Speaker: Rory Blyth
Rory Blyth, formerly of Microsoft, is one of the most “prolific” answerers on Stack Overflow with the highest vote to answer ratio on the site.  Rory is still very focused on iPhone development, in particular MonoTouch by Xamarin. You can find Rory’s new site at Rory.me (once he actually starts blogging there).

DVCS, if you’re not doing it – you should be
Speaker: Marco Ceppi
Marco Ceppi is a professional Web Developer and Linux Systems Administrator, though in his spare time he is an open-source developer/advocate and moderator on Ask Ubuntu. He owns Ondina, a web hosting startup designed to revolutionize the hosting industry. For the past four years Marco has been using Git and DVCS tools in and out of the work place, providing talks to employers and the community at large about the effectiveness, efficiencies, and simplicities of DVSC tools like Git. You can find out more about Marco at his website and on Twitter.

If you haven’t already registered, head over to our page on Eventbrite to register.  Don’t forget to use discount code “blog” to save $100!

We’re excited to share an in-depth look at just some of the confirmed speakers for DevDays 2011!  The program is comprised of heavy hitters on topics picked by you and the rest of the Stack Overflow community.  As Joel mentioned, the purpose of DevDays is to provide a top-notch education on several technologies and these speakers certainly live up to that challenge.

San Francisco, October 12-13:

Salman Khan
Sal Khan is the founder and one-man faculty of the Khan Academy (khanacademy.org), a nonprofit with the mission of providing free, high-quality education to “anyone, anywhere” in the world. A former hedge fund analyst with degrees from MIT and Harvard, Khan was helping a young cousin with math in 2004, communicating by phone and using an interactive notepad. When others expressed interest, he began posting videos of his hand-scribbled tutorials on YouTube. Demand took off, and in 2009 he quit his day job.  The Khan Academy is the most-used library of educational videos on the web, with two million unique students per month and over 50 million lessons delivered.

Scott Chacon
Scott Chacon is the VP of Git at GitHub. He is the author of the Pro Git book by Apress (progit.org), the Git Internals Peepcode DF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage (git-scm.com) and the Git Community Book.

Scott has presented all over the world. LinuxConf.au, OSCON, RuPy, Symfony Live, Ruby Kaigi, RailsConf, RubyConf, Scotland on Rails, Euruko to drop a few names. He also does corporate training on Git all over the world.

Chris Smith
Chris Smith is author of “Programming F#” and was part of the F# team at Microsoft. Now he works at Google bringing next generation language tools and IDE services to the cloud. He has a passion for fruity drinks with umbrellas and writing movie reviews.

Sydney, 25-26 October:

Sam Saffron
Sam is Stack Exchange Valued Associate #00008, joining the team in June of 2010. Living in Australia, Sam is a core developer on the Stack Exchange platform focusing on performance and scalability. Sam enjoys building his own stuff too, most notably Community Tracker, written in Ruby on Rails, and Media Browser, written in C#. Since Sam started working for Stack Exchange he launched the Dapper ORM and Data Explorer open source projects and helped design and launch the MVC MiniProfiler open source project. Sam also built profiling products for Symantec, where he worked as development manager for the performance team for Altiris platform prior to joining Stack Exchange.

Ryan Thomas
Ryan is a developer on the Confluence team at Atlassian, currently working on Confluence 4.0 and having implemented the current continuous deployment infrastructure.

London, 14-15 November:

Jon Skeet
Jon Skeet is user 22656 on Stack Overflow, where he tends to post about C# and Java. If you want to attract his attention, post a question pointing out a situation where a C# program doesn’t behave in an expected way, citing the specification. Please don’t do so shortly before this talk though, as he’ll be very distracted until he gets a chance to dig into it.

In terms of coding-for-money, Jon is a software engineer at Google’s London office, currently working on the Google Offers project. He speaks in a personal capacity, however, not on behalf of Google. Except to say that Google is hiring, and any CVs should be sent directly to him.

Marc Gravell
Marc is a long-time Stack Overflow user, elected moderator, and has been working on the Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange team since 2010. He also writes some code occasionally (focusing on C#), and is involved in a number of OSS projects in the .NET community.

Michael Barker

Michael Barker is currently a lead developer at London Multi-Asset eXchange (LMAX) where he spends most of his time scratching his head while thinking about simpler and faster solutions.

Intermingled with travelling to various countries around the world, Michael’s 10+ years of experience has been spent battling unnecessary complexity across a variety of industries (finance, telecoms, government) and in whatever technology that happens to have been hurled in his direction (Java/JavaEE, C++, .NET).  Michael is also a sporadic Open Source contributor having dropped patches into a number of OSS projects including PostgreSQL, JBoss, GNU Classpath and most recently Mono.

Washington DC, December 15 & 16:

Rick Minerich
Richard Minerich is a Researcher at Bayard Rock, a new company dedicated to applying the cutting edge from academia to solve real world problems.  He’s been working in, speaking on, and writing about F# for the past three years and was recently awarded F# MVP of the Year for his work in the Microsoft community.  His most recent publication is “Professional F# 2.0″, a guide to F# for the object-oriented .NET developer.

Ryan McGeary
Ryan McGeary is a freelance software consultant, business starter, speaker, and amateur triathlete.  Ryan is the owner of McGeary Consulting Group, a software development and consulting firm in Northern Virginia.  He is a partner and co-founder of BusyConf.com, a conference organizing web application.  Ryan is also co-founder of Let Me Google That For You. Ryan specializes in web application development and enjoys leveraging new tools and frameworks for his day to day development efforts.

Stay tuned for additional speaker announcements as we complete the agenda(s).  If you haven’t already registered, head over to our page on Eventbrite to register.  Don’t forget to use discount code “blog” to save $100!

The following post is the first in a series documenting our ongoing planning and production of the Stack Overflow DevDays 2011 conference series. 

Upon joining the Stack Exchange team in April 2011, one of the first meetings I went to was a sit down to discuss the plans for our DevDays 2011 conference.  Most conferences start their planning at least a year out, so we were already a bit under the gun given that we were targeting a September start for the conferences.

The first question was about the scale of the conferences.  Our only previous comparison was to the 2009 DevDays: a one-day stop in ten cities around the world, each priced very affordably.  While the one-day conference, range of cities and low price point made it easy for people to attend, there were substantial shortcomings.  First, with only 7 hours of total time for content, we didn’t have time to cover all of the topics that we wanted.  Second, there wasn’t time for people to network or socialize outside of the conference session.  And third, because of the low price point, we couldn’t afford to put on a quality conference: food was lacking, internet access was intermittent to non-existent, and the missed microphone and video cues were a-plenty.

In order to improve the events for 2011, took a serious look at the feedback; We found that a low quality conference just wasn’t an option for us and we needed to “bulk them up” – hence we decided to hold a two-day conference in four cities priced at $499 each.  We structured it such that conferences would still be highly accessible to the community, but would allow us to fix almost all of the issues with the 2009 conference.  In addition to doubling the amount of time we have for content, a two day format allows attendees to spend with each other at evening networking parties and mid-day breaks.

The next decision was where to host them.  We knew this would be a hot topic once announced (one only needs to look at the multitude of “Why not in city X” comments that are left on any post discussing locations), so we wanted to make sure that we thought through it well.  It was immediately clear that we needed to do events in the Western US, Eastern US, Europe – we also figured on choosing one more “wildcard city”.

Western US:

This was actually the hardest locale to decide on given just how many cities and options there were.  Given the distribution of developers, it was clear that we were going to stick to the coast, which left us with four major options: Seattle, San Francisco, San Jose and Los Angeles.  After reviewing demographic data and stats from the 2009 conference, Seattle and SF jumped out to early leads so we dug in and started searching for venues in those cities.  Given the size of the conference (and other tech requirements, which we’ll go into all the technical details in a later post), there weren’t that many options for venues, especially in Seattle.  After we decided to co-locate the Server Fault Scalability conference with the West Coast DevDays, the decision was locked: we needed to be in the Bay Area.  From there we looked long and hard between both San Francisco and San Jose – both had their respective advantages, but ultimately the date patterns and pricing were better in SF.  Plus Jeff lives right across the bay and we wanted to be nice and give him a short drive.

Eastern US:

There were just as many choices for cities on the East Coast as on the west, but thanks to a couple key criteria, it was much easier to make a decision.  First, we wanted to stick to a metro area with a major developer community: that narrowed it down to NYC, Washington DC and, Boston.  New York was out fairly quickly due to the incredibly high cost of doing anything.  DC has a larger community than Boston and is more centrally/conveniently located for others coming from places outside the northeast.  We also really wanted to do a community based hack day and DC had the best setup and date pattern to accommodate it.

Europe:

Another case of a pretty easy decision, as London jumped out to an early lead.  We have a huge community in the UK, two of our biggest 2009 DevDays were London and Cambridge, its fairly easy for anyone in Europe to get to, and there are tons of venues to choose from.  The UK is also an English speaking country, which makes traveling in much easier for anyone coming in from abroad (given that all of our content is in English, we felt fairly confident assuming that all attendees speak it).  Oh yeah, we also have a remote developer who lives in the UK.

Wild Card:

There were lots of options for the fourth conference: we could have done another stop somewhere in the US or Europe, tried a conference in Asia, or even just gone to Hawaii and relaxed for a week.  As we thought about it though, Sydney emerged as a clear favorite: it’s placed apart from the other conferences so we wouldn’t be overlapping too much, Australia has a strong developer community (not to mention they’ve been bugging us for a while to come down under), it’s convenient to Asia, and once again, it’s an English speaking country.  Also, in what has become a common theme, one of our developers is based there.

Well there you go, the background into how we picked our format and cities for Stack Overflow DevDays 2011.  If you haven’t already registered for your city of choice, make sure to head over to Eventbrite (and use discount code “blog” to save $100) and get signed up!

Stack Overflow DevDays, the universe’s best conference series for coders, is back, and it’s bigger than ever!

Here’s the idea behind DevDays. You’re a developer. You’d love to learn all the latest hot new technologies. Things like DVCS, HTML 5, Node.js, CSS3, Hadoop, etc. The stuff the cool kids are all talking about on the playground while you’re stuck in the basement somewhere grinding away on Java Enterprise Visual Basic.

The idea behind DevDays is a fast, high-bandwidth, fire hose tutorial on at least ten interesting concepts. We’ll assume that you’re a developer, you know what a loop is, but each tutorial starts at the ground level and gives you a whirlwind tour through a technology by showing you actual code. Every presenter launches an editor and writes code from scratch and shows you what it does. There are almost no prepared PowerPoint slides with ten bullet items each containing 10 words explaining the ROI benefits of some new technology. There are not even any PowerPoint slides with cats and pandas doing hilarious things, such as this one:

Yes, DevDays contains precisely NO funny pictures of cats. We might have Jon Skeet with a sock puppet, though:

(That was Jon Skeet and Tony the Pony from London DevDays 2009.)

What we have instead is some great presenters from the community who will write code and compile code and explain it all while you watch, and you’ll come away knowing enough about each new technology to know what it’s good for, what it’s not so good at, how to do the basics, and how to learn more. Bottom line: it’s the best possible way to spend two days and learn as much as you would learn in two years of reading Twitter.

We have FOUR, yes FOUR different DevDays conferences coming up this fall. Each one is its own production, and they’re all going to be spectacular. If you came to DevDays last time, prepare to get blown away. This time everything is DOUBLE. Two days instead of one. Better food and coffee. Better locations. Bigger screens to make it easier to follow along. Lots of social activities. And, for the first time ever, we’ll be visiting one city in Australia (shown at right), for an antipodean increase of infinity percent.

Anyway, registration is now open. The schedule is:

• October 12-13 San Francisco
• October 25-26 Sydney
• November 14-15 London
• December 15-16 Washington, DC

There are two! special! bonuses! you should know about before you choose a city:

1. In San Francisco, the day after the conference (October 14), Server Fault is holding a one-day High Scalability conference. You may want to go to both for a full three days of amazing amazingness… if you think your heart can handle the excitement.
2. In Washington, the day before the conference (December 14), we’re have a big open source hackathon. The entire Stack Exchange dev team will be on hand and it’ll be a lot of fun.

So, go, sign up now. You can save $100 using discount code blog.