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, 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.
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.
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.
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).
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. 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.
my own preferences are irrelevant.
I certainly hope not.
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 => $$$.
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.
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. You could cover the basics of using the port for
developing Android apps, the difficulties you experienced doing
the port and the troubles others might have in doing their own,
... 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.
