Theo Schlossnagle
Appearances
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
No, it was the content. There was content that couldn't be recorded.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I think that the... It's complicated. I was disgruntled with Velocity. They shifted direction and went more like front-end web-oriented. There wasn't a backing. SR Recon had just sort of emerged and you wanted something that actually honestly felt like the original Velocity audience.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And then once we took on that task, it was a lot easier to sort of recraft the desired aesthetic of the event into something that I also liked.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I had thought about that. You had said that, and I actually had thought about plans for that.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Like everyone was testing their, their metal at that point in an ever expanding scale on the internet. So like the horror stories were, um, more, they were fresh. Right. Now it's usually the same old story told at a different company at a different scale or a different tech. But the catastrophic failures that people talked about there were, they felt novel at the time.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I, I think that's where we were on the front edge of the kind of universal video access that was unpaid.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But we weren't the first definitely, but, but I think it was like, we were then two years of that really becoming a thing.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I think the shift that I, one of the reasons for the shift that Steven's so like frustrated with, I think that it used to be that you didn't want to, you know, blow your exciting presentation on an online YouTube video that everyone could just consume because you wanted to use it at the conference where you got and had that hallway track that was so valuable.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So like submitting a talk, becoming a presenter, going into speakers, dinners and things like that, where everybody kind of shared a lot of there's a lot of mind share in the room. That that that whole arc was important. So the idea of just like putting that talk online without any sort of pomp and circumstance didn't serve those other other desires very well.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
There were definitely some speakers that, I mean, why would you watch a Netflix comedy special? Or why would you go see someone at a theater instead of just watching their next Netflix comedy special? Right. There is some aspect of personal satisfaction you get by setting the audience, being in person and all that kind of stuff.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And there were a lot of like seminal tech leaders that gave talks that attracted audiences where you're like, I've been in that same talk three times. They're still there and they're showing up because it makes them excited and it reinvigorates them. I don't see that anymore. But that was very much the case.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Why building software makes systems administrators angry people?
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Oh, yes. Yeah, I remember. I remember the whole thing was there was a hardware bug in a virtualized NIC adapter that was slightly different than an actual hardware bug in a NIC. It was wild.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
The two things that changed there were that people wanted to be bigger. Everybody always wanted to be bigger. It was a corporate-run conference. While I was the CEO and the major stakeholder, there were other stakeholders. They didn't want to do it unless it could be bigger. So we had to shift venues. The old venue shut down. There was a lot of things in the way.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And then we just realized that conferences were changing and getting more expensive. So we couldn't provide the same quality at the same price. And SREcon emerged as something that was redundant in content. So we had fewer people. No, it wasn't that. There was a velocity. I'll go on that.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
A Velocity waited until we published our dates three years in a row and scheduled over top of us so that they would deprive of us. That's the reason why we sold it. I remember now, because I was there for the first year they did that and I took a sabbatical from the company for like two years. And those second two years were really rough because someone tried to put out the flame.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So I will say that the conference that I've been to recently, I mean, that's been three years now, but CraftConf out of Budapest. I love CraftConf. It's incredibly Surge-esque in its aim for its attendee experience.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I'm comfortable with my age. Let's put it that way. And it's good to know that you and Stephen's relationship is as old as my first daughter. So when did we meet? My guess is probably 2003 or 2004.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I mean, I think it's easy to explain. As you know, all those networking events that people that like networking events go to, this was the one, the only type that engineers truly enjoyed. That's right.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
The Santa Clara Convention Center had that same aspect. When you sat on that bar, everyone walked by. Yes.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I, maybe, maybe. My first conferences were the ApacheCon conferences.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
We ended up relocating. I think we did it in Baltimore at another place. It's all vague memories now, but then we ended up switching to the Gaylord in National Harbor, which is not far away. It's about 40 minutes away, but yeah, completely different vibe.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I know this feels very dreamlike, but it was, it was an incredibly posh X Shriner temple. Right. So like there were like hidden doors and all sorts of weird stuff. It has what was considered at the time, the nicest women's bathroom in the United States. So they, they shut it down for like a half an hour every day to take people on tours of the bathroom. It has like chaise lounges in it. Carpet.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It's just like crazy. It was a wild place. It's now just a hotel.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
My first conference was surreal because I was in grad school, didn't know anything about, you know, open source other than it seemed cool and, you know, communist or something. I don't know what I thought back then. It was wild. So I wrote a patchy module to do load balancing as part of my master's thesis and wrote a paper on it, submitted it to the conference, went there.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Talk about unique venues. What about like Foo Camp and Kiwi Foo?
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It is gone. It is gone. But Foo as a general camp style is still there. It's an unconference. Everybody shows up with a shared mission. There are no talks. And then you quick board. I forget what the term for that is. But you whiteboard all of your concepts. And then you vote for the ones that you want to see. And then it's self-organizing.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I had this really weird experience at my first food camp. That's where I met Nat Torkington for the first time, who is a delightful, delightful human being that requires a special tolerance.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
um he's a trip he's a trip he is so wonderful um i remember i was very very young at the time um i was 22 or something like that 21 and i i got there and he he was 26 or something he looks at me and he learned that i was 21 and he looked surprised and i said what he's like oh the years have not been kind to you I was like, wow. Okay. All right. This is how this relationship is going to be.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But yeah, I sat at a table with Esther Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Danny Hillis, and one other person having lunch. And they were talking about like building nuclear reactors in Mexico and feeding the, the, the energy back to the U S it was the weirdest fricking thing. And that was in like 2000 and, I think it was like 2003. Maybe it was 2003. Yeah. That's going to be, it was 2003. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I went to a KiwiFu in New Zealand in, I want to say, 2008. 18, 2019. And that was really interesting. But I mean, it's sort of off the reservation. So it's invite only. But like the the the topics are not unified enough in mission statement where you just get a weird array of things. So it's I don't know. I think the other conferences for the conference's sake now.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And it turns out that they gave me the closing plenary slot with like 2000 people in the audience as my first talk ever. And they only got smaller from there for a long time. But yeah, it was really cool. It was in Orlando at a resort, so I spent most of my time in swim trunks with a Mai Tai. In front of 2,000 people. Not at the same time, but very close.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I think that the appeal of the online conferences are more like online conferences. it's very hard to get the sort of interactivity that you would get at a, at a regular conference. Um, a lot of times there's not multiple tracks, so you can't use your feet.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You have to like, if you're not interested in a session, you know, you, there's no other, you just have to like tune out until the next session comes. Um, those things are tricky. Um, I've always been a big fan of, uh, non-violently, you know, voting, voting for my interest with my feet. Right. I have walked out of some great talks just because it's like, Hey, I think I know this content.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I'm going to talk to this person later. Anyway, I'm going to go over to this one. I haven't seen before. I've heard that's that might be interesting. Um, I find the atmosphere of in-person not too large. So the sweet spot at the other end of what Stephen's saying is that 200 to 300 person conference is the right size for me. Monktoberfest pulls it off because of the single track.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah, stay away from the academic conferences. Go to the commercial conferences.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That's not at the 150 to 200 range. But that's the right number to make me want to go somewhere. If it's bigger than that, I'm not a salesperson. I don't want to set up a million meetings. I like to be able to not plan everything and run into interesting people that make it worth being there. I think if the conference is bigger than that, you have to plan everything ahead of time.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You have to plan your encounters, all of that kind of stuff. And I'm not into that. So CraftConf is interesting in that the speaker group is so large that you end up having this sort of large floating nucleus in the conference that makes that sort of feel the same way.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I'm biased in that. I haven't attended a lot of conferences, not as a speaker. So that was like the core portion of my, my activity when I ran the company was speaking. So if, if I count, um, all of my, my speaking engagement was over 300. Um, and then it was over two 50, if there were more than one speaker and there was over 200, if there were more than one track.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So I was like, always, always at a conference, you know, sometimes a month. Yeah. I didn't have the luxury of attending very many conferences at Cindy. Mocktoberfest was one of the few.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It was ApacheCon. Okay. Discussion of all projects Apache, which at that point, I guess that was 1999. Yeah, that's got to be super, yeah, interesting. 1998, maybe, one of those two. Right. And there were, I don't know, there were probably 100 Apache projects back then. It felt like there were eight or 10.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
But there's always been, you know, an order of magnitude more Apache projects than anyone even at Apache knows. But it was really weird because there was a convergence. It was right before the dot-com boom that you could feel the ramp up at that point.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
So there were all of these companies that have sent their people there to say, hey, you run this software that apparently we don't pay for support for, but sending you to this conference is going to make us safe. And there were a lot of people there.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I had high hopes that, that when we shifted into this online, uh, online remote work that, um, Uh, companies would successfully bow out of their, their, you know, ridiculous office space, um, investments and invest in corporate retreats and lots of them. And that did not, cause it would save a ton of money.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And we, we did that, but, but I mean, I think that that's a great opportunity to actually turn some of these abandoned office buildings that are never going to be filled out into sort of space. Where you can run a corporate event with different sizes of people and have it be both engaging and entertaining with a primary focus on social team building. Because you have to load up on that stuff.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I would figure you have five or six three-day events in a year that are completely off-site. You're entrenched in the team you're working with. You're in the trench with them working on stuff and doing fun activities and all of that kind of stuff. And then you work remote the rest of the time. You don't have to go in the office at all. My hopes were destroyed. So I quit my job.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
The crazy part is that we did that before from like 2007 to like 2015 with conferences. Yeah. They didn't save any money, but they did send everybody somewhere, usually twice a year for a couple of days to go to some conference that they were working with. And it was an incredibly good experience. You know, you get to work with other technologists. You get to share information.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
You get cross-contamination of mistakes and, you know, good ideas. So that stuff's missing. Yeah.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
The problem is, is that the hallway track that's here just doesn't, doesn't resemble the spontaneity of the hallway track at, at like a healthy conference. Right. I, I, I don't, if I know who I want to hang out with, I can go to a birds on a feather or jump in a channel, but, But here, like in a lot of these conferences, there's a main channel where everybody can talk to each other.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
No one uses that because it's too much. And then there's a channel based on topics that presumes you know what you want to talk about. You can do direct communication, but that's too intimidating. But you can't...
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Go into the like, click on a random, I guess you could click on a random channel that you don't know anything about and eavesdrop and then decide whether or not you want to actually participate, which is sort of how the hallway track works is that you're just near some sort of conversation and it's either interesting or it's not. And you get either pulled into it or repelled away from it.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And you're bouncing around and you find some interesting stuff. And then it was unexpected. It was unplanned. And it's fantastic.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I learned that I can have an underage relative, underage family member, like my children, operate a bandsaw, which is only allowed to be operated by 18-plus employees. That's fucking crazy, right? That's a good way to lose all your fingers.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I don't know. Somebody get me offline and tell me whether or not I'm getting a shirt.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I'll just update you. It's all safe. I am getting a shirt. Okay, good. There you go.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
I, you know, I think it's a combination. Well, you know, there were very few academics at these conferences, so I think they've resembled them, but I'm not sure that it was a Genesis. I feel like the Genesis was birds of a feather and, and, and user groups, right? You got your, you know, your old car user group and you've got your Apache web server user group and hung out together.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
It's one of the things that was controversial about Surge was the selection criteria on that was not about the most interesting content. Because a lot of times you could find that online already. We wanted the content interesting and relevant, but we wanted the speaker to be engaging on stage. We wanted people to go in and come out and be like, wow, I'm really glad. That was cool.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And then they realized they were spread all around the world and could never meet up. So they, they started creating conferences. to actually get together as user group.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
And that took a lot of work. And it took a lot of time meeting those people in person to figure out what their energy level was. It was a lot of work.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
That's exactly right. That's correct. Because it's one of my favorite cities. And I was thinking if I went on a rampage looking for horse, I'd be in Ghent.
Oxide and Friends
Conferences in Tech
Yeah. I operate a butcher shop. So I'm very familiar with all of these things from the inside.