
DevDays 2011 is Cancelled - nsoonhui
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/devdays-2011-is-cancelled/
======
chunkyslink
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 ?

~~~
mathattack
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.

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

~~~
mathattack
If I buy something, and the vendor screws up, if they give me a bunch of
excuses, I am more likely to think they'll screw up again. If the vendor takes
personal responsibility, there is less chance that they'll make the same
mistake again.

~~~
pbiggar
Ah, I didn't get that you had bought a ticket.

~~~
mathattack
In full disclosure I didn't. I am just throwing out opinions from the cheap
seats. :-)

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archangel_one
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
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.

------
teej
Sounds like a classic case of premature scaling.
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-
of...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of-startup-
death-premature-scaling/)

------
zdw
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.

------
damncabbage
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.)

------
SteveJS
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.

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AgentConundrum
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.

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

------
nopassrecover
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?

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mirkules
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
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.

~~~
mirkules
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.

~~~
saurik
To be fair, venues for conferences don't really have obvious economies of
scale: not only do larger conferences often cost more per person, but the
quality of the venue and the "rowdiness" (for lack of a better word; arguably
the "liability" ;P) of the crowd drastically changes things.

For example, if I wanted to a one-day event with a bunch of reasonably happy
low-key developers, it is quite easy. Starting on the small end, with
something like 5 people, I can do it in my apartment (and people often do
this, for small "meetups"), and if we went up to 10 people, everyone could
come to my office.

Even if I wanted something just a touch larger, the venue costs are still
going to stay near zero: if I wanted 20 people, I could borrow someone's
conference room, and if I needed to go up to 50 people I know someone nearby
who would probably loan me their auditorium/theater setup.

With 1-300 people (most conferences), there are lots of choices, from hotels
to "community centers": often these are really cheap ways of getting a bunch
of people to be able to congregate. If you have a tech conference, you might
even be able to get really good rates on something like the eBay "Town Hall".

However, DEF CON is simply /not like this/. DEF CON is a four-day conference
set at a fancy hotel in Vegas. This year, the estimated attendance was 10,000
people; and these are not just your "quiet developer type": these people
(while largely not gambling, which is important), are drinking constantly and
hacking stuff.

Yes: /hacking stuff/; like the elevators, which were half offline for a day
because someone was trying to mess with them (I'm certain their other guests
were not happy about this); or the lighting/sound system, which someone
managed to find out had a default password, so someone central control and
would cut the speaker's mic at just the right moments to drive them most
crazy.

I kid you not: the point-of-sale terminals at the hotel were offline for a
while one day because someone took them offline; there were rumors at the
conference that someone had setup a "rogue 3G cell" (to sniff unencrypted
connections; apparently people used to do similar things often at previous
events), and everyone who attends the conference simply "knows" that you bring
enough cash to never have to use the ATMs at the hotel: they are probably
skimming cards.

And yet, this event is still managed to be run for only $150/person. Insane,
huh? ;P Frankly, I have a ton of respect for how DEF CON is able to scale with
this kind of insanity, and not run anything but a horrible loss (and for all I
know, they do).

------
davweb
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.

------
TrevorBurnham
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.

------
rodh257
I'd love to see an online conference like <http://www.mvcconf.com/> with the
speakers who were signed up giving their prepared talks

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rsobers
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.

------
aherlambang
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).

~~~
SoftwareMaven
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.

~~~
eschaton
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.

~~~
akuchling
I was co-chair of Python 2006 & 2007, and in preparation I went to SMOFcon. SF
con issues have some relevance to tech cons, but only partially so:

* SF cons don't usually provide food for all attendees, which is the big cost driver for tech cons. For PyCon 2011, catering was 54% of the budget.

* Tech cons mostly don't have to worry about people in costumes, keeping under-18s out of certain events, or as much rowdy late-night behaviour (e.g. room parties).

* Tech cons really, really have to worry about the WiFi network. Recording every presentation may also impose more A/V requirements.

Going to SMOFcon was somewhat useful to me, but the differences are
significant.

~~~
georgemcbay
"SF cons don't usually provide food for all attendees, which is the big cost
driver for tech cons. For PyCon 2011, catering was 54% of the budget."

Isn't the catering cost a catch-22? The only reason to expect food at a tech
conference is because you (or more likely your employer) is paying out the
wazoo for a conference ticket to begin with.

I'd be much more likely to go to a tech conference that was $99 and gave me no
food than go to a tech conference that cost $500+ and was fully catered. I can
take care of my own food needs for far less than $400 over the space of a
couple of days.

~~~
akuchling
That could certainly be done, though I didn't convince myself it would work
for PyCon. I suspect catering is definitely optional for small events or
unstructured things like BarCamps, but for large events it becomes a
necessity.

If the conference has 500 or 1000 attendees, the hotel restaurant probably
can't handle that many people, so there have to be several restaurants or a
mall food court nearby, enough of them so that they don't get overwhelmed by
the attendees. That rules out venues that aren't downtown, because suburbs may
not have that density of restaurants within walking distance, but such central
venues have more expensive room costs.

Another tradeoff: The lunch break would probably have to be 2 hours, because 1
hour is a bit tight for walking time + waiting for service + eating, which
means less time for conference programming. Attendees _like_ lots of
programming, the more the better; in fact, PyCon attendees asked for breakfast
as well as lunch, so it's easier to attend an early-morning event.

And the monetary risk of running an event is large, so like Hollywood film
producers, you quickly stop wanting to tinker and try something new; it's
safer to stick with a format that's worked in the past.

------
cookiecaper
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.

------
kevinherron
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.

------
ig1
BarCamp style conferences have proved it is possible, even in London which is
the one of the most expensive city in the world.

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ZipCordManiac
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...

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

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

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

~~~
damncabbage
I think he was being facetious.

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

~~~
damncabbage

      And as numerous people above pointed out, ...

Including me ( <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968214> ).

I was referring to him calling the price hike a "modest" increase. I read it
as him being intentionally inappropriately flippant about the thing that
killed the conference (in a mildly humourous and self-effacing manor).

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

