DConf 2019: Shepherd's Pie Edition

[Joakim]

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low-bandwidth, outdated in-person talk format that is done much 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 at 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.