Bryan and Adam were joined by Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady to talk about conferences in tech. A lot has changed in the past couple of decades about the impetus for conferences and what makes it worthwhile to attend.In addition to Bryan Cantrill and Adam Leventhal, speakers included Theo Schlossnagle, KellyAnn Fitzpatrick, and Steve O'Grady.The lightly edited live chat from the show:ellie.idb: 2005, huh? y’all met when i was 2goodjanet: yea i was younger than 10 loljgrillo_: I was just thinking I feel very young because I was a junior in high school but not anymore lolaka_pugs: my first conference - 1975ellie.idb: oxide appeals to the youthjbk1234: my first one was LISA in 05 or 06... mostly because it took a near act of god because my director didn't believe in sending his people to conferencesjgrillo_: "before software ate the world" is what I usually call "when the internet was still fun"ellie.idb: my earliest memory was, uhhh, Google I/O 2008 when they gave every attendee that android phoneellie.idb: i don’t recall which one it was, but i do remember playing with it when i was 5 hahahahataitomagatsu: I've only been to one tech conference in person, and it was a very tame SIGGRAPH that happened in Santiago, CL (I live in Chile). It was a lot about animation. I wanted it to have talks on image processing like the ones over on the US x3 but oh well, beggars can't be choosersgoodjanet: I've never been to a tech conferencedevdsp2175: The Germans know how to run a conference. The chaos communications congress is wild.ellie.idb: same!! never actually attended one as an adult hahahataitomagatsu: Have you attended one remotely?goodjanet: nope, closest is just watching recorded talks after the facttaitomagatsu: I attended the rustconf of 2 years ago remotely. It was amazing and I was soooo tired by the end of it. Brain got depleted of juice for the daynetwork2501: looking forward to in person dtrace conference with a dedicated zball roomahl0003: more of a trade show, but I went to the MacWorld conference in the late '90sahl0003: I still have some BeOS install CDs from thengoodjanet: im so thankful for recorded talksahl0003: this is kind of wild: I went with my brother who was 12 or so and we met a guy at Be... my brother would go on to work with him 30 years later!ellie.idb: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motorola_Droid the OG droid with the flip up keyboard and everythingtocococa: ISCA this year was just around the corner from Santiago in Buenos Aires and it was pretty cool, and CARLA took place this year in Santiago tooblacksmithforlife: Since I can never get a conference approved from work, I live off recorded conference videos on YouTubenetwork2501: best momdevdsp2175: The shade! Sending hugs to Bryan's inner child.taitomagatsu: daaaaaamn, I didn't know about either! I might keep an eye on ISCA, maybe I can go next year ❤️devdsp2175: You can't record the hallway track...jh179: Bryan's talk for Papers We Love on the History of Containers is how I found out about him, Oxide and all the rest. Had an incredible tangent about jails...zeanic: Conference idea: all hallway tracksdevdsp2175: YouTube keeps recommending Bryan's talks on running containers on the metal at Joyant.devdsp2175: And I keep watching them!ellie.idb: wow, ISCA had some really fucking cool talks this yearellie.idb: damn. i’m adding this to my watch list too!!! i’ll try and see if i can get funding for next year hahahatocococa: yeah, 100%, but my brain was melted after every daynahumshalman: Bryan has the luxury of working on OSS. I think the point that Theo was making is that Surge (I only attended the very last one) was a space where you could be open about proprietary stuff. Talking about failure in a safe space, etc.nahumshalman: Ah, Theo is now making that point.taitomagatsu: Does ISCA have any sort of official YT channel?taitomagatsu: Because I might... have a handful of talks to watchgoodjanet: 18 years ago isnt that long ago?network2501: 18 years ago is almost 3 generations of lives/eras agoellie.idb: what HPC conferences are going on? i need to hear about the deets going on with CXLjgrillo_: although 18yr is ~half my life it doesn't feel very long ago..tocococa: I am not sure, I know that all keynotes were recorded, but I don´t know where they might beellie.idb: 21 years ago i was not alive 😅network2501: What if the second time you do the talk it's even better than the last? Like book revisions?ahl0003: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i1OK4y9x0wtaitomagatsu: I've found a channel that has older ISCA videos https://www.youtube.com/@acmsigarch2299, imma keep looking for one that might have the 2024 oneblacksmithforlife: Working in government, watching "old" conference videos is great because they're "cutting edge" for where my organization is at currently. Case in point, we are just now going to the cloud and doing micro servicestaitomagatsu: https://xkcd.com/979/ahl0003: https://craft-conf.com/2025srockets: That’s why I liked !!con so much. No one tries to sell you anything.jgrillo_: I've never owned a car newer than 20yo, that's kind what it's like when you look at the car ads from its eradevdsp2175: Are you also doing an "Agile Transformation" which is neither transformative nor optimising for agility?ahl0003: https://monktoberfest.com/srockets: (Also, Ghent had better bike racing than Budapest)srockets: But worse weatherbcantrill: https://youtu.be/stMEuZJJDck?list=PLvsKqlNNP3R8JKE97pwewsDmZdcO5MEWVdrkellyannfitz: Here are the talks from this year: https://redmonk.com/?series=monktoberfest-2024blacksmithforlife: What does "hallway track" mean?zeanic: Cr...
Okay, now you can hear me. Oh, yeah. Boy, can we hear you. We'd like to hear a lot less of you. No. It was not plugged all the way in. I know you're dying to know the answer.
Yeah. Theo, how are you? Doing well.
And Killian, you're here.
I am.
We understand we are going to be assembling like Red Monk Voltron here. We're going to be putting together various limbs. Steven is here in some diminished capacity. Is he on stage yet? Have we dragged him on stage yet?
No, I have not seen him. Steven, if you're in the audience, please take up your hand.
Oh, there you are. In the audience, if your lights are on and you are about to be towed, Stephen O'Grady, your lights are on.
There it is. Stephen, how are you feeling?
Oh, you know, super strong. That's great.
You actually sound unwell. This is not like pretending to be unwell.
No, the trajectory has been better. So this morning, I couldn't talk at all. And that was not super helpful. But we'll see how long I last. The hot toddy seemed to help a little bit, although I can't taste anything at all because I smoked the inside of my mouth with some broth earlier.
Steven, I like the fact that your colleague is somewhat surprised at how unwell you sound. It's like, wow, I think he's actually ill. This is the post about the flu test. This all might actually add up. You actually might be sick. Yeah, that's right. I'm here.
You can at least understand me now, so that's good.
that is, yeah. And, and we understand if you need to drop dead at any moment. So you, you will not need to apologize. If you feel free to drop dead, feel free to, but you know, I, Hey, look, if you're well enough to skate, you're well enough to podcast as my mother is fond of saying. So I'm, I'm glad to see that.
I do not give you permission to drop dead. That's not happening.
Yeah. Yeah.
I'm not, that's not real high on my agenda, but.
Theo, you also may not drop dead. I'm sorry. Well, I am really stoked to have you all here to talk about a conference, a subject that is near and dear to our hearts, which is conferences in tech. And I was kind of reflecting back on Because, Stephen, I met both you and Theo at conferences. Stephen, I think you and I may have met at Sun Network in 2002. Is that possible? Something like that?
That seems sort of roughly in that ballpark, yeah. Although, dating us is probably not a great thing.
Yeah. I'm sorry, I'm doxing you as old. Listen, don't you listen to our podcast? This is like the Gen X Senior Hour. We talk about attending readings from Ad Rock of Beastie Boys.
You're talking to somebody who tries desperately to conceal exactly how old his company is. We try to pretend that there is no birthday.
You want the company to be younger than it is?
We just don't like to talk about how old it is. It doesn't necessarily need to be younger. So we just pretend that that doesn't exist.
Okay. All right. Yeah. Red Monk has got an aging complex or something. Are you getting Botox injections for Red Monk? I noticed there's no crow's feet. I mean, Red Monk looks like, as far as I know, it's the Brian Johnson of companies, of consulting organizations, we often say. So you've got the...
Okay, well, so in the unspecified past, Theo, I don't know if you've got the same hangout, but I mean, you and I met, and I think Theo, when do you think we met?
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.
I think we met at OSCON 2005. Okay, that's feasible.
Did you do a Detroit session there?
Yeah, we did a Detroit session at OSCON 2005.
I don't know.
Pour one out for OSCON. Okay, so let's start actually a little bit with OSCON. OSCON was the O'Reilly Open Source Conference. And, Theo, you had been to OSCONs earlier than that, I think. That was my first OSCON in 2005, but I think you had been maybe a couple years prior.
I, maybe, maybe. My first conferences were the ApacheCon conferences.
Okay. Okay, so, yeah, tell me about your first conferences.
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.
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.
Questions and answers afterwards, we're at the poolside, yes.
Your grad student conference experience was just very different and much better than mine is what I'm hearing.
Yeah, Kelly, you're making a very important point. For those of you contemplating grad school, this is Theo's experience is highly unusual and atypical. This is not what grad school normally is.
Yeah, stay away from the academic conferences. Go to the commercial conferences.
Much higher budget. And so was this, what conference, this was ApacheCon? What was the conference?
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.
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.
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.
Okay, interesting. Part of my hunch is that just looking at kind of the history, OSCON being one of the early industry conferences, that this kind of came out of one academic computer sciences conferences. Academic computer science has... the very strange tradition of having conferences as their kind of publishing vehicle rather than journals, which is what every other scientific discipline does.
And that combined with these open source and open source projects that needed to have a way or were looking for a way to get people that were otherwise collaborating to physically meet up because they were not co-located. Is that a fair kind of read for the origin of the kind of those early days of conferences?
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.
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.
And there's something actually really special about conferences of that vintage because you kind of felt like you had a super nerdy interest that you were in a Usenet group with people talking about maybe RARC. And then to meet those people in real life felt very kind of validating at a time when to be in software was kind of counterculture. I mean, it feels so...
I mean, God, it feels just so ancient. Sorry, Stephen, we're going to date Red Monk here as being founded in the 1880s at this rate. I mean, it feels like such a distant time when this is kind of like before software became overrun with tech pros and ate the economy. Before software ate the world, it felt like I don't know. What was your first conference?
So I went back to my calendar, because I was curious about that. I think my first conference, and I'm not sure this counts, but the first conference is the one we went to, AA Debug, and that was an academic conference. So I'm not sure I'm going to count that one, but that was a very academic conference.
A conference that I think we've actually already talked about on Oxide, friends, because this is the conference in which we sought to eat horse. I heard that. Yes. This is the California. Were you in Ghent? Yeah. You were in Ghent.
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.
that is exactly what happened. The, we, we called it run, Brian run after run Lola run popular at the time. I, a film, um, the, uh, no, we were Adam at the, uh, California had just made past a, a populist proposition, making it illegal to consume horse meat.
Um, and Adam never wanted to have his diet dictated by the people was, uh, it was enraged and said that while in Europe, we needed to go find horse meat.
I wasn't angry. I was focused. I have a much more unique perspective on that now.
Yeah. I operate a butcher shop. So I'm very familiar with all of these things from the inside.
Can we, can we get some, some horse meat from you? I mean, you can just maybe a little under the table. We will, we'll make it interesting for you. Okay.
California, but we'll go across the border.
What if Alexander Hamilton wished to order some horse meat? Would that be, would that be possible?
Yeah.
um sorry no no it was so it's a debug uh which is a weird conference and i think not i don't know it was a weird conference my my next one also a weird conference was sun network in berlin i don't know if you remember this conference brian uh it was it was like 21 years basically to the day we were celebrating your 30th birthday we were celebrating my 30th uh we were celebrating my 30th birthday
You were trying to keep that a secret from the VP. That's right.
We've been told there was a German tradition that on your birthday, you buy food for everybody else.
Right.
I was like, do I actually have to not tell people it's my birthday? I had people who were German who were like, if it's your birthday and you don't want to bring a plate of sausages for your coworkers, you should definitely not tell anybody because it is definitely expected.
Again, we're going to have to apologize to Germany on the podcast. Once again,
uh apology video but the other thing is this is gonna sound hopelessly quaint it was even probably quaint at the moment we were told that we had to wear suits and i being a child didn't own a suit so like i bought a suit for this sun network conference in berlin uh in 2003 we we celebrate your bar mitzvah in berlin in your right
my brooks brothers yeah your brooks brothers suit yeah i had forgotten about the suits uh okay steven how about uh what was your what was your first conference oh man uh best guess is like some random ibm event um from the firm that james and i worked at prior to starting runbook um they sent us this i don't even remember what the event was but i got down there and was like
the hell is this like how's this work where's everything what am i doing here um so yeah it was uh you know sort of a shock to the system as it were but right because we go to so many of them now so
Yeah, I was going to say, have you counted how many conferences you've been to in your life? No. No, I don't want to do that.
I want to weigh the lanyards that I have, though. Instead of counting the number of conferences, just the weight of conference lanyards and badges.
When I lived in Denver, this was years ago, I would take all my lanyards and I would hang them up right above my desk. It got to be this enormous pile, and I was like, this is just that now. I'm getting rid of all of them. The desk collapses. At this point, it's probably been... I don't know. I've been doing this for... I'm trying to think. I don't even know what the number would be.
Because we're going to half a dozen a year, at least. Been doing it for a long time. It's a big number.
What was your first conference?
My first, so I was an academic before I was in tech and I was a medievalist. So when we talk about the history of Red Monk, that's why I'm willing to talk about it. Because, you know, for me, decades is not that long. Sorry, Stephen. And so my first conference was with Medievalist and they have a very different view of the world, even compared to say like other folks in the humanities.
So you would go to a Medievalist conference and be like, you talk your papers and you talk and then there'd be like a party, there'd be a banquet, there'd be wine, there'd be beer, there would be actual need, right? So going from that to the tech industry wasn't too bad. But my first actual tech conference was Monctoberfest 2015.
Oh, there you go. Okay. Wow. Um, I think, I think mine was, I think like yours, Steven was a prior to a debug Adam, which is obviously very memorable for many reasons. Um, the, um, it was an internal, uh, the sun had a sun tech symposium, um, the STS where one of these large, but it was an internal conference, large internal conference.
This is the conference where they had had apparently a complaint in previous years that there were too many things for people to pick from. And this is before anything was videoed, which I think is kind of important. Remember when we're remembering that super early conference era, like talks are not recorded.
You go to the talk, you watch the talk and like, it's whatever you can remember from the talk basically. Yeah. Which is such a sea change in the way we consume information. But they had gotten the feedback that there was just too many talks to pick from.
So they came up with what they thought was a brilliant solution where every presenter at STS, this is in 2000, every presenter that was selected to give a talk would give their talk three times in a row, back to back to back. And it is the only time in my life I've done this. This was in Denver. I grew up in Denver.
And my mom said, oh, well, if you're coming to Denver, I want to come watch you talk. Very supportive mother. And so I give the first talk and they're like 15 people there. And like, I'm presenting something that's pretty esoteric. And I'm like, I don't think I'm going to be able to fill three rooms on, this is the real-time support in the Solaris operating system. And I'd make 15, 20 people.
And then in that next middle session, one person shows up. And my mom also shows up for that middle session. And I explained to the guy, I'm like, look, this conference has got this very weird idea that everyone presents back to back to back. You know, my mom is here. Why don't you, let's wait to see if someone else shows up.
But if no one else shows up, like it doesn't make sense to give the talk just to you. You can come in the next, I'm going to give this talk again a third time. You know, I'll kind of like go to lunch with my mom or whatever. I'll come back and I'll give the talk to you. And he just says, I don't really feel like doing that. I'm like, okay. And then no one else shows up. And so he sits down.
I'm like, all right, I guess I'm going to give the talk to you and then my mom. And so I start giving this talk and this guy like starts spacing out during my talk. And like, you can't do this. Like there's only one person here. Like the social contract is now different. Like if you're in a big room, you can like space out. That's fine. There's only like one person. It's just me and you, man.
Like you can't like look at the ceiling or whatever. So I kept like trying to make eye contact with him. He's kind of, this is like before phones and laptops or whatever. So he's like literally, you know, like doing the crossword. Doing the crossword, absolutely. Counting like the flowers on the wallpaper or whatever. And fortunately, there was one other person there. It was my mom.
And she was just like, just totally locked on. And I'm like, you know what? I'm going to give my talk to my mom. And I felt like just mortified. I'm like, my mom is... This is the... like technologically the smallest audience I can possibly have. And, uh, but you actually was, it was after that, I was just like, I felt bad. And my mom was like, that was, I, I learned so much in that talk.
I'm like, mom, I just, I'm so sorry. You had to like see that. Oh, cause then we get the end of the talk and I'm like, well, I mean like obviously stop me if you have any questions. Cause you're the only person here. And we get to the end of the talk and he just like walks up and leaves. I'm like, okay, goodbye. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Whatever. Anyway, sorry.
So that was starting from a real low there. But then, yeah, it was AADbug and then OzCon. But in those early days, the conferences had a vitality to them because it was the only... I mean, it's not that they don't have vitality now, but it was a special kind of unique vitality, I feel, because you had just no... No other way of consuming a bunch of this information. Am I being nostalgic here?
Steven, without acknowledging how old Redmug is, what are your thoughts?
Yeah, I think conferences today are very different. To the point where I'm at the extreme end of the spectrum at this point where you know, to your point, you know, sort of back in the day, you know, you'd go to a conference, you know, at least for most people, you know, analyst lasso.
But for most people, they go to a conference, you know, to watch talks, you know, that aren't recorded, you can only get them there and so on. You know, these days, everything's recorded, right? You know, for the most part. And so my, sort of my, probably skipping ahead here, but like, you know, the way that I look at it at this point is that,
I don't ever want to go to a conference at this point and see a talk. That's not why I'm there. I could do that at home. The only reason for me to travel and be at an event and spend time away from family and everything else is really to spend time meeting with people face-to-face because that's the part that I can't duplicate. It's the only reason I'm going to these events.
That's the tough thing. Conferences have not sort of transition and a lot of them, uh, and many of them won't, right. You know, you have an event like reinvent, you have hundreds of hundreds and hundreds of presentations. People are going for that, you know, that that's fine.
Um, but you know, I think it's, it's, you know, again, like if the, if the primary, I don't know if, if, if what you're going to a conference to consume is, um, you know, straight content and presentations and so on. Like, I just don't see the point of, you know, getting on a plane to do that. Yeah.
you know you know because it's in in many cases you know it used to be okay you can interact with the speaker afterwards but that's you know such a zoo at this point right um you know that you're not probably going to get facetime with the person who's giving the presentation in most cases so yeah anyway and so yeah i'm i'm sort of at one extreme end of the spectrum because sort of as analysts you know for what we're doing is very different but um
Yeah. I mean, even, even if I was there for the real negative talks, man, probably.
Steve, let me get this week because I, as a speaker, like I, like I will not give a talk if it's not recorded. And I will not give a talk if it's not recorded. And, and like the recording has to be made publicly available. That's not true. And, but so I kind of like, yeah, Oh, yeah, definitely. Where we couldn't record your talk?
Well, okay, so because of me.
No, it was the content. There was content that couldn't be recorded.
Okay, Theo, you know, I have like a few regrets in life that I didn't record that talk as one of them. I, so this is the, it was the, my talk at surge 2010. So this is, yeah, it was kind of moving on a little bit, but this is, uh, Theo becomes frustrated with velocity, right? Theo, I think I'm telling the story correctly. Yeah.
And you're like, I, and cause velocity had just, I mean, I think that had just not served, was not serving the practitioner all that well. I mean, if the, what was, is that, what was your, what was the exact source of the disgruntlement?
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.
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.
Theo, have I voiced to you my desire to have a Surge 2010 reunion?
I had thought about that. You had said that, and I actually had thought about plans for that.
I would love to do a Surge reunion, just because that... I mean, do we agree that Archer pays for it? I mean, I think so, right? Yeah, and it's like the guy that hit the jackpot. He pays for it, whether he knows for it or not. No, he doesn't know for it. So I don't know. Did you go to the search conferences, Adam? This is like 2010, 2011, 2012, 13.
No.
Oh man. They were really, really good. They were really good because it was like also feel like it was kind of a jackpot in terms of timing too. You know what I mean?
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.
They did, and it was also at an era when it was kind of like before... When folks were hitting these scale issues that weren't just at the hyperscalers. Hyperscalers were not hyperscale at that point. They were all a lot smaller. I don't know. It just felt like those years felt special. And also, it was in Baltimore, which is great. I just... very fond memories of, of surge.
And now you, cause I think that was also, that's an early conference that was, that was making videos available from talks.
I, I think that's where we were on the front edge of the kind of universal video access that was unpaid.
Yeah. Right.
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.
And you think that YouTube starts in 2006, 2007, which is just not that long ago. And then you hit this kind of era of conferences where, I don't know, a bit of a different kind of a golden era. If you had this kind of pre-recorded golden era that we can all live as in our memory, you had these talks that are all recorded. But also, like, really broadly attended.
Because, Stephen, people don't have your disposition today of, like, well, I'm just not even going to go to the talk. I'm only going to watch it online. People are definitely watching it in person. But the fact that the recordings are made available, really. And, I mean, what I started to realize after, like, a year or two of this is, like, wait a minute.
There are way more people consuming this when it's recorded than are in the room. Right.
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.
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.
One thing I think that you mentioned, the whole point of the pumpkin, there's a pumpkin circumstance, but then there's also that element of can you get feedback on your talk? Which if you're looking at conferences from like the more kind of academic point of view, talks are almost that they can be that thing that you're kind of maybe even still working on.
So if nobody's going to your talk and nobody's giving you feedback on your talk, that's a big change from, I think, how things were many years ago.
Yeah, and I think that's a very good point because I think when talks became recorded, it did change kind of the tenor of a talk. It was kind of necessarily more of a performance and less of a dialogue. It was not a boff. To go back to kind of the birds of a feather sessions, it was much more of a...
I mean, not necessarily scripted, but definitely not necessarily having that iteration of an idea was not happening as much for sure when you kind of hit that recorded era. And I decided somewhere along in there, like 2013 or 2014, I decided that I'm never giving the same talk twice. And I'm just not going to do that.
I would say, Brian, at the time, that felt like, I don't know. At the time, I was like, oh, that's a great idea. That feels almost controversial. Now, with the proliferation of video, I feel like, I mean, I don't want to take anything away from you. But why would you do it twice? You're right. Exactly. Exactly. And I'm only going to give a talk if it's recorded.
It's like, why would they not record the talk? You know, here we are in 2024. But I feel like what was once a bold position has now become people's expectations.
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.
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.
What about the annual, like Werner Vogel's, like, will he pass out? Will he actually have a heart attack this time? Like, I think we're, I mean, I've never, I've never been to it live, but I've certainly watched, I would go to that.
Is this reInvent?
Yeah. I mean, have you ever seen his talks at reInvent?
No, I didn't realize that.
I mean, he just gets real sweaty and animated. Very into it, starts breathing very hard, and you're like, laughs onto every word because it could be his last.
Am I the only one? I think that's a little bit of edge to it. I kind of like it. I mean, it keeps the audience on edge. Oh, 100%. I do think that some of those were... It is great when you've got a room of people that are really engaged in what you're saying. It's energy that really does bring something that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Theo, one of my favorite talks of yours is your closing plenary from Surge 2011, I think.
Why building software makes systems administrators angry people?
This is where it was the Elfin, the Larry Wall Elfin. Do you recall this?
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.
It was wild. A little bit of this is like, you were complaining to me. So the conference is like, we're kind of in the pre-conference, like the days before the conference. You're like, I've got to give this plenary in like three days and I've got no idea what I'm talking about.
And then like unrelated to the closing plenary, you were relaying to me your like the extreme frustration of your past week, which I found hilarious. I'm like, Theo, that is your closing plenary. Like you just need to go and like describe your week. And I still feel, I got to say, I still absolutely love that talk. Because in part, because you can just like feel your visceral pain.
The thing I also love is Adam, Theo goes down a blind alley because someone has his exact problem and suggests a fix. And then someone replies to him saying, thanks, that fix worked for me. The fix was wrong. And it totally, and there's like, it feels like there is a special place in hell for someone who says a fix that does not work works for them.
You can waste an arbitrary amount of time, but it was, uh, it was right. And I think that was kind of like, that was definitely that era of like, you've got a big room and it was great. I mean, it was, it was, it was, it was a lot of energy, live performance. It was, uh, it was really terrific. Thank you. But then I feel like you guys did Surge for, I think, five years and then folded the 10 up.
I think it was... Something like that?
No, I think it was six. Six? Something like that.
I think. But you stopped doing Surge, presumably because the dynamics were shifting and obviously conferences are super expensive. And what would... Maybe this gets to part of what Stephen was saying in terms of the dynamics really changing about conferences.
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.
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.
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.
I'll get you Schlossnagel. You could start a conference in opposition to Velocity. I was the Velocity China chair for fuck's sake, but whatever. Yeah, these people eat their own. And then O'Reilly, I mean, that was an O'Reilly conference. O'Reilly had many, many years of conferences. And then after COVID, O'Reilly totally folded that up and decided to go completely online.
But there was this kind of three-legged stool of you had the attendees. It was kind of in their interest to go. You had the speakers. It was kind of in their interest to go because they are able to get their ideas out there. Things are recorded and so on. And then you also have the sponsors who are there.
And I know that Theo Steve still remembers fondly Surge 2010 when he realized that he is with all of these practitioners. He's like, I am the only sales guy here. He's like, I am fishing in a stocked pond. I'm on a game preserve and I've just got like... no limit, no bag limit. He was like, this is great. I was like, please do not tell anybody else about Surge. He loved that conference.
But of course, that is not sustainable. You can't actually have a game preserve. You actually need to have this kind of other element, this commercial element of people who are there to sell the products.
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.
It is great. Have you ever been to Budapest, Adam?
Never, no.
Oh, it's amazing. It's better than... Okay, easy. Easy, easy, easy. Let's just settle down here.
Ghent is my second favorite city.
Ghent is the third largest city in Europe in like 1550, behind Paris and London.
And it captured the moment, man. It still has it.
And then it was like... I feel like I gotta come in here and defend Ghent. Come in, you'll appreciate this. This is a medievalist. Ghent was then the changing wool trade, and wool being... It was no longer a port for wool, which was all moved... I feel like this is like...
yeah that's right uh and so it basically is kind of like economically kind of collapses and as a result like it's not economically interesting and so it doesn't get bombed during world war ii so it's like it's totally it's a completely preserved yeah frozen in time amazing city budapest also an amazing city don't make me choose that's what i'm gonna say theo whatever theo says i i don't think they're both great cities but yes craft conf is great
But it's just far away is the problem with GraphConf. And then, I mean, Stephen, you've obviously been, you know, had a front row seat for all of this kind of changing in terms of conferences. And you started, when you guys started, was MonkeyGraw before Monctoberfest or was Monctoberfest before? What's the origin of Monctoberfest versus MonkeyGraw?
Yeah, Monctoberfest was first. And then, so we get through the first Monctoberfest. We never run an event. I ended up sleeping for something like
14 hours after the event or something because we didn't staff it right we had no idea what we were doing and uh and then james gets up on the on the stage uh at the end of the first one i'm just like thankful i survived and he's like and we're doing monkey graw and it's gonna be like in a month two months or whatever it was you're like what and i was like that's that's all i like you could do that but i'm gonna have no part of that so um so yeah that's my total stress was first
2010?
Okay, well... 2011, according to the history of Redmond.
What's the difference? What's the difference? We were on either side of that one. So the... Obviously, Red Monk is your... Have Monctoberfest be your first conference. Monctoberfest, I think, is still something special. Steve, do you want to describe why Monctoberfest and why that's endured?
Yeah. So, so we wanted to do basically two things. We, we have been fortunate enough, you know, we've been doing this over one, we've been doing it and we've gotten to know some really cool people doing interesting work from lots of different disciplines. Right. And it was okay.
You know, what, what if we brought them together and put an emphasis like, yes, we have talks and the talks are great and whatever, but what if we just brought them together and optimized our conference for the hallway track? Yeah. So that was our sort of our theory. And we needed to obviously figure out what our content strategy was.
And so we ended up doing, you know, I talked to, I don't know, probably two dozen people, you know, and, you know, we sort of came up with some ideas. I don't know. The way we describe it now is not necessarily the language we use at the time, but it's basically the same principle, which is... I talk to people like, hey, I'm going to come in and give a talk on Python internals.
It's like, hey, man, there's an event for that. We don't need another... Um, and more importantly, like our, our audience is very diverse and people are, you might have sort of one portion of the audience, which is super into that. And, you know, another portion of the audience, which is totally relevant. So we try to do is basically find things that are, uh, horizontal.
In other words, they, they touch on, you know, uh, some, or it's certainly a majority of the audience, but, um, ideally, you know, all of them in some form or fashion. And most importantly, they just don't have a home at other events. Right.
So, you know, this past Octoberfest, for example, there's a great guy from Microsoft, David Smith, and he and his partner, Jay, have been coming to the event for years. And sadly, Jay died. And so David pinged me and was like, hey.
you know, could we have like a, you know, for developers and other technologies, could we have a talk that's about the practical experience of grief, like how this works? And that's not a talk that you're, you're not going to see that at reinvent.
You're not going to see that somewhere else, but you know, those are the kinds of things where if we think it's important, you know, for the people are in orbit, to have the opportunity to hear messages like that. Some of them are gutting. I know Rachel's listening. We had Kelly, not Kelly, Kellyanne, Kelly Sturman, I believe, gave a talk on his son's experience with Instagram and social media.
Oh, God. Oh yeah. That was intense. And you know, so what we're trying to do, like I said, some of them are lighthearted. Some of them are, are, um, you know, really potentially traumatic, but what we're trying to do with the event is create a home. Like I said, just two things like optimize for the hallway track and then have people think about the world around them. What are they building?
How are they building? Why are they building it? Um, and sort of, what does that look like? And so, um, When people propose things, the heuristic is actually really simple because, in other words, I can look at it very quickly and say, all right, if this has a home at another event, it's not a good talk for us. It doesn't mean it's a bad talk.
We turn down lots of things that would be great talks, but they have homes elsewhere, and that's not what we're trying to put together.
There is a question in the chat about what the hallway track is. Is that a Gen X term? No, but I think that's a really good point because like those of us who go to conferences all the time and like Steve clearly has been running like Monctober Fest for a while. Like we've privileged the hallway track, but like the question of like, what is it if you're not used to that term?
Yeah. I speak Gen Z. So it's low-key chill for real, for real. No cap.
I don't speak Gen Z. I have no idea what you just said.
No, it's fine. My kids right now, unfortunately, my kids don't listen to this. They would be just absolutely just, oh God, to be real. Mortify the drop dead. Yeah, the hallway track is the, and maybe this is a dated term, but this is like kind of the meeting outside of the talks when you're talking to people in the hallway.
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.
I'll give you an example. One of the reasons that I miss OSCON was that it was the one event for many years where people from all sorts of walks of open source life would get together in one place at one time. And I tell the story endlessly internally. But there was one year I was there for three days, I think it was, and I had 30 minutes unaccounted for the entire three days.
And I didn't go to one talk. All it was was meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, meeting, and or bumping into people in the hall. And so there are some events which are... very good for that. The Portland Convention Center, Portland, Oregon, was much smaller and easier to navigate. You can't do that at reInvent. It's too big.
In other words, you hit a certain point and the hallway track is not a thing because it's not navigable. But...
i hadn't really thought about that by the portland convention center in portland or portland oregon it is kind of like it's a very large hallway actually you could basically you could walk in there and grab a table outside the starbucks and yeah every 10 seconds or so like somebody would walk by it's like oh hey i haven't caught up with him you know or her in a while It's like, great.
You can sit down and catch up, and then other people would stop by and say, I've seen them in a while. That's the type of experience for me. Like I said, that's what I get on planes for. You cannot duplicate, in my view. If you can, if somebody's got a way to do that, please let me know.
The Santa Clara Convention Center had that same aspect. When you sat on that bar, everyone walked by. Yes.
Well, and so a perfect example is that, so one year, OSCON went down to Austin. Yeah, I was going to say. It was at the Austin Convention Center. Disaster. Totally, totally broke, you know, the hallway track because that place, you know, for people who haven't been there, it's like a maze. It's like Harry Potter. You get on a fucking escalator, you end up like three floors away.
You're like, wait, what? Like, How does that, I'm trying to get to, anyway. So that's the thing is, is that some of it is the design and size and scope of the conference, but some of it is the event or the event venue rather. And like I said, the bigger and more complicated they get, you know, the sort of more unwieldy and frankly impossible, you know, the hallway track gets.
Okay, so let's talk about size a little bit because, you know, you, Stephen, I mean, it'd be interesting to know your perspective on this, but one of the things that is a challenge with Monctoberfest is you want it to be small. So therefore it's like, it's hard to go. It's like hard to score a ticket.
It's not something that like, you are not able to accommodate everyone who wants to attend Monctoberfest.
Yeah, you know, and that's a trade-off. And, you know, sort of, as you know, we've sort of thought about, you know, we used to release all the tickets, you know, to sort of prior attendees and or people signed up for the list. We cut that in half. So we only release half ahead of the time.
So then people who've never been have, you know, sort of an opportunity to score half the tickets, but half the tickets at the event is, you know, under 200 tickets, right? You know, we're typically between 150 and... you know, 200 people at the event. So, you know, it's limited.
And that is, you know, unfortunately, you know, cause you know, sort of very much like Theo, we've had people many, many times over the years saying this is great. And, you know, can we scale it up and so on? And we sort of looked at it after the first year or two, we're just like, We can't, we just can't scale the event to the way that we want. Could get a little bigger, sure.
But again, you begin to add people and it breaks down because the reason that we kept it the size that we did, this was, this floored me. So after the first one that we, the first Mocktoberfest in 2011, excuse me, Um, we capped, we intentionally capped attendance at a hundred people because we're like, we've never run an event. It's probably going to be a disaster.
So when it fails, let's keep the blast radius small. So, um, we had a hundred people and people that seem to have pretty good time. And, uh, I had a bunch of people come up to me after and say, I met more people at this event than any other event I've ever been to of any size. Um, And I was sitting there, I was like, I can't, that doesn't work. We're too small.
There's literally 100 people in the room. But it turns out if you take 100 people and you stick them in the same room, single track, and it's a very navigable space, they end up having conversations. It doesn't hurt that we serve beer at lunch, which tends to free people up. But that's a fundamentally different approach. And we cannot scale that to...
three, four, five, you know, 600 people, um, or up. It's just, it's not, you know, it would break fundamentally the word, you know, sort of what we value about the event itself.
Totally. Well, and a few, I think in terms of like a venue, cause Steve, did you go to the, any of the search conferences? I'm not sure if you, yeah.
Um, yeah, yeah. I went to two or three of them, I think. Um, but yeah, I was late to that party.
because that venue in Baltimore was definitely amazing and unique. I feel like Theo, I mean, when you scaled up and you changed the venue, something changed in the conference. I mean, it was still great, but it was different.
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.
The, the, where you held it in Baltimore was like, it was like four hotels that were mashed together. And so you would be on and you wouldn't, didn't really know which hotel you were in. And I just remember you would be on floor three in one hotel and then you'd be on the fourth floor in the next hotel without actually going up or down any stairs.
Or it was just like, it was kind of delightfully confusing that they always like, and there were rooms that were like kind of like abandoned ballrooms. I mean,
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.
It's just like crazy. It was a wild place. It's now just a hotel.
I think it's, but it's kind of interesting because I think this gets to like what, what conferences need to do to like, if a conference is going to be an in-person conference, there's gotta be something about it. That is that like there's about the venue or about the experience. I mean, obviously at McToberfest, Steven, you've got, you've got the local beers and the local flavor.
I mean, there's, and it's, I mean, it's obviously always going to be, I would assume in Portland, Maine, a very difficult city to get to from the West coast, but always worth a trip.
But again, that's part of it. Right. So in other words, you know, sort of the difference there, because again, we've had people ask us like, Hey, can you, you know, could you move this out to San Francisco? Can you do it? So the answer is sure. I mean, we could, but part of the part, part of the opportunity is, is that if you, if you are in Portland and, Right.
Particularly if you're coming from the West Coast, like you really have to want to be there. And so, you know, if we ran it in sort of downtown San Francisco, we'd have people, you know, show up. And this is sort of not to cast a burden, but people would show up just because they could. Right. Not because they're necessarily invested in the event.
But that's what we do around here. Look, this is the, you know, this is... We just kind of show up at places. I've done it many times.
Talk about unique venues. What about like Foo Camp and Kiwi Foo?
Yes. Yeah, totally. Yeah, Foo Camp. That's where actually I met Bob Lee, the late Bob Lee. I met at Foo Camp.
What is Foo Camp?
Friends of O'Reilly. Friends of O'Reilly.
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.
Yep. And it's invite only, importantly.
It is invite only. And I knew when I was invited, I'm like, I think I'm going to be invited once. So I should just enjoy it because I don't think I'll be invited back. And that was right. So I was right about that.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
Yeah, the food camp I went to was in 2011, where I saw Quinn Norton presenting on Bitcoin. And I often think of how many... If I had only had to see... This is where Adam... We had this meeting with the proto-Twitter, and I'm like, I'm never going to do that. Those guys are jokers. And Adam's like, those guys are jokers, and I should reserve AHL on Twitter. And it's...
Which I noticed, by the way, the American Hockey League, now you and the American Hockey League have this kind of ongoing bit where you've got AHL at Blue Sky and now they've got the AHL at Blue Sky.
God bless their social people.
It's really heartwarming, honestly. It's like a buddy movie, you two.
Yeah, they've been great.
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.
Okay. So, so we've got these kinds of conferences that are for, that really are focused on this kind of like social aspect. And I don't think those are going to go away. Um, I think that they've also, I mean, I think one of the unfortunate bits, I mean, I think both the strength and the minus is that you've got this exclusivity with it.
I mean, I do think like these, you kind of think of these food camps that are, you know, these are kind of extraordinary folks, but it's not like the, it's not open. It's invite all things on open all comers. Um, Just to shift gears a little bit, because I do think that the way we present information and giving talks, I do think is important. What does the future of that look like?
And obviously, I've got my thumb on the scale a little bit because of what we're doing with detrace.conf this week. It should be said, Stephen and Theo, both attendees of the 2008 detrace.conf. I'm not sure. That was so much fun.
That was one of my favorite experiences where... Somebody asked in the room, it's like, okay, who has basically written sort of low-level internals for hardware? And every goddamn hand goes up to the room, except I'm looking around like, yeah, man, I don't do that. No, I was not very good at this. So one of these things is very much not like the other.
Oh, that was so great. And that was a very technical, fun conference with a very niche conference. Nobody is asking us to scale up. This is not something that we have. We were like, boy, this conference would be great, but can we do it at the Santa Clara Convention Center? No one's making that request.
Yeah.
And Stephen, as I'm sure you recall, this is a conversation I recall so vividly because I remember exactly where we were at the end of the conference meeting. when you're telling me this has been a great conference, but, uh, next year is going to be like, you just like next year is going to be worse. I was like, like this conference is not even, like today's not even over yet.
Like I can't even have today. And we're already talking about next year. It's like, no, I don't remember that.
Yikes. That was, that's poor.
Oh, no, no. It was, no, no. It was extremely helpful. You're like, no, like, look, I, you know, this conference, it's like, this was great. I'll hide it to you. Like, this was really great. This is amazing. You brought it. But like next year, like some people can make it, some people can't make it. And then everyone's just going to invite comparison to this year.
And it's just going to be like, people are going to kind of like reminisce about this year. Like next year, just not going to be quite. And then like the next year, like won't be good as getting it. It'll just kind of fizzle out. And I'm like, can we talk about this tomorrow, maybe?
Do we have to talk about this? Well, what I'll say is that I've certainly learned from organizing a conference. Because 100%, when people come up to you with feedback during the event, you're like, not now, man. Just not now. Wait, I'm happy to hear it after the event. So I will say, in my defense, that is a much more important thing.
this is 2008, this is before 2011. Yeah, sure, shut up at your first Monctoberfest and be like, hey, Steve, before you go to sleep for 14 hours, I've got some feedback for you.
And it happens every time, right?
No, but I actually really appreciate it. Because this is what, like when, this kind of like, you're like an apparition from the future. And as, because we had this idea like, oh, this will be an annual event. And I'm like, no, no, we need to not make it an annual event. And they're like, no, forget it. We're just never going to do it again. That's it. That's the way to play.
We're not going to do it again. And then it was when we hit 2010, 2011, 2012. And then by 2012, we're like, well, maybe we can't do it again because no one can remember 2008. And I'm like, this is why they only do the Olympics every four years. We can do the Olympiad cadence. Um, and this is, this is 2024. It's a, it's a Detroit Olympiad year.
Um, but we did make the decision to go completely online. Um, because, um, for Detroit.com was great for, you know, in kind of that 2008 era, uh,
um but now it's like why would people travel when they can get i mean and this is this is going to be interesting to see like i i'm so this is on wednesday by the way not that this is a not that this entire episode is just like a cheap promo for our our conference but you know it is free to attend but actually because one thing that that's important is that it's uh it is actually freely available for everybody like i'm not going to charge anything and anyone can go and you
Because I like the socialization you get with the exclusivity, but everything else about the exclusivity I don't like. And I want as many people to be able to participate as want to participate. Now, in Detroit.com's case, I'm not exactly worried about being overwhelmed with attendees. But what do you make of the online conferences, Stephen and Thea?
You know, like I'm in favor because, again, you know, it really just depends on sort of what, you know, we use the, you know, Christensen notion of jobs to be done a lot at Redmonk. And, you know, if the job that you're trying to try to sort of tackle is, hey, I want to get, you know, essentially content and messaging and lessons learned and so on out.
Um, you know, virtual events, a great way to do that. Right. And, you know, I can say like, so I, I walk a lot for, uh, just for, for health and so on reasons. And one of the, one of the things I do all the time is. okay, you know, I don't have time necessarily sit down and watch this talk, but I will pull them down and just listen to them while I'm walking around. Right.
And, um, you know, so it's, it's a great way of sort of, um, you know, sort of maximizing, you know, sort of the availability. Um, now again, it's all trade-offs, like it depends on what you're trying to accomplish, but you know, I'm, I'm, you know, like, I think if it's, For me, it's either sort of online, small and in-person, or huge.
And those are the types of events at this point, at least for me, speaking just for myself. Those are the ones that I'm likeliest to attend. Right.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So that works from like the, I definitely agree with you from like the speaker perspective or even the attendee perspective, the economics though become harder at that small scale. Right. I mean, Steven, I mean, I, you guys, I mean, it's, it must be tough to pull off. I would assume.
I mean, it's obviously a huge amount of work, which is another thing actually it's worth talking about in terms of like the actual burnout folks get from organizing conferences.
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.
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.
Yeah, I was going to say, you tend to, yeah.
Brian, what's the last in-person conference you've been to?
Monctober Fest, I think.
Okay. Not this year, but the previous year.
But the previous year. I think Monctober Fest 2023. I don't know. Did I go to – and this is where I think – no, because I did do Monctober. I may have done it in person last year that I can't remember. Well, increasingly because the online conferences and the in-person conferences are actually blending together.
Okay.
I do think that folks are getting some tricks about online conferences to give them more of that. I think P99Conf, I think that those folks do a terrific job of getting a great energetic hallway track by mixing up live and pre-recorded events.
Um, so I, I think that the, um, that's part of the reason that they're actually, um, blurring together, uh, in a, in a delightful way, but yeah, I don't go to very many in-person conferences and I only go, I generally only go if I'm a speaker because just, I mean, it's just harder otherwise.
And, you know, I went to a, one of these kind of traditional, I mean, not to call them out because I think if they do a great job, but I went to go to Chicago in 2023, um, And it was, to attend for three days, it was $3,000. It's like, man, that's a lot. I mean, that's not a hotel, and that's not travel. That is just the cost of attending the conference.
It was like $2,800 or something like that for three days. And, like, that does not economically work, really. I don't think. I mean, I'm like, and then I think that they, and I'm sure they're going to change it up because, like, when I was at that conference, I'm like, this conference is many fewer people are attending.
They were not recovering at all from their pre-COVID numbers because the cost is so high. And as a result, like you're losing that critical mass and they're still at that kind of, Stephen, you said that like conferences need to either be online, very intimate, experience oriented, or very large. And it was absolutely falling in that gap.
And it's like that, that's the valley of death for a conference.
Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing I talked to the organizer to, you know, sort of a bunch of events that were kind of in the mid sort of size. So, you know, a thousand North, a thousand people sort of less than, three or four, and she was saying it's almost impossible to pull them off. Because the selling part, in terms of what you get out of it, small intimate conferences are easy to understand.
very very large events like reinvent you know there's everybody uh is sort of from the industry is there so you get that but it's a small like thousand people two thousand people three thousand people um you know there are definitely events that pull that off but i think it's much harder um you know these days because it's it's travel budgets are tight um you know a lot of you know once you have the option of like hey these things are gonna be online anyway
right? You know, that, that can be a tough sell, you know, for people to get travel budget to go to events. Yeah.
And so I, I kind of want to, I mean, so I think the thing that we're experimenting with, I would say with the just.com for 2024 is can we, can you get an online conference that has a bit of an unconference feel to it where it is a little more loosely structured, can we get to some of that kind of community building and get some more people kind of giving talks?
Because I do think it's helpful for people to give talks. But of course, you're giving a talk to... It's like you're giving a presentation at a Google Meet. It's not the same kind of experience. But I think it's actually important as an industry that we are getting younger technologists an opportunity to present their work. And I'm a little worried that we... If conferences...
don't afford that opportunity. Uh, that's a bit of a problem. I think it's really important that we, we afford that to folks. Um, but I don't know, maybe, maybe, maybe I should be, maybe the youths are just like, no, we're all like YouTube influencers. We don't make like, you know, don't know. I, I, I make, I have like 6 million views on this, like unboxing of a toy that I, it's fine. Uh, uh,
But I do think that that's important. So I think this is going to be a different kind of experiment. I think we're also going to try a bit of the unconferency bit. And we're trying to find, I mean, Adam, do you want to describe what we're doing? I think we're kind of trying to use Discord and Google Meet and YouTube streaming and try to hit a sweet spot in here.
the higher bid is we're making up as we go, but we have, you know, we're trying to collect some topics. You know, one of the things that about the unconference in the past that we've done with detrace.com is like, we write down the ideas, like literally people are hollering out stuff and then moving their bodies and circling things with markers and so forth.
And knowing that that's going to be tricky. We're trying to on discord, you know, this existing discord where, where folks are now. Yeah. collect ideas that people have and to circulate some of these ideas.
Then we're going to have a Discord channel for each talk so that we can discuss the talk as folks are giving it, have Q&A for the speakers, for the presenters around that, and then switch to a different channel so that we can have that kind of archived along with that video, kind of focused conversation on that talk. And, you know, we're going to see how it goes.
It's going to be a stage dive, potentially onto concrete. You never know around here.
We know we've softened it up with some bodies already. We've softened it up with some bodies. We're going to juice it up with some folks who we know are going to give some interesting presentations. And we have some cool work at Oxide. This has been sort of pent up. So we know that there's like not nothing there.
Uh, and I'm looking forward to seeing what folks from the community have to have to share and what, what people want to hear about.
And then we are also doing a, an in-person social here in the evening. So we're, we are really trying to have it both ways and knowing that this is like not something that people will travel for. So we'll be, um, I don't know, you know, this could be, maybe it'll be the worst of all worlds, but, um,
At the very least, at the very least, we have a very wearable t-shirt. I mean, that's, that's at the very least, that's what we get out of it.
I use. Okay. Yes. That I thought you were, you were saying at the very least, it's going to be cheap because it definitely is cheap.
Is that too? Yes.
It's economic. Well, no, because I do think this is an issue that like that, that the, this is, it has become so expensive and yeah, and this is also like remote work.
I mean, and, and I mean, Stephen, you must've also had this thought about like, you know, we, if we are transitioning to a more of a, a truly remote world, what does that mean to kind of come into the world when it's all remote and how people, you know, as young technologists, how they actually like connect with people on, on obviously the world is also more connected than ever.
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.
Oh, I love that Fantasia. What a, what a nice word that would have been.
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.
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.
Yeah, I mean, what a great world that you're describing where all of this corporate real estate that is not going to be used properly can now be – we can take all of that money and we can actually invest it properly in having people that are remote but then spending that money on bringing them together.
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.
You get cross-contamination of mistakes and, you know, good ideas. So that stuff's missing. Yeah.
Well, I think there are going to be some new models. I think Raphael in the chat is saying, sometimes if things are too produced, it feels too intimidating. Raphael, maybe I'm putting words in your mouth. Maybe this is not what you're saying. What I think you're saying is, I love how underproduced DTrace.com is because it tells me that anyone is welcome to present.
That's right.
We have such a poor audio on your podcast.
That's right. Such low production values that nobody feels intimidated.
That's right. You can't possibly have imposter syndrome around here because we clearly have got no idea what we're doing. But if you can do that, then you can maybe do more of them. I mean, I still think. like this very podcast has been great for us. I don't know why more folks don't do these things or if they do, I can't find them.
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.
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...
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.
And you're bouncing around and you find some interesting stuff. And then it was unexpected. It was unplanned. And it's fantastic.
So I would like to say that the shirt, and Adam, you were calling out that the shirt is an absolute banger. Kudos to Ben Leonard, our designer. So I don't know if you saw, Theo, our shirt for Teachers.conf 2024 is taking some of this inspiration from 08 and kind of reimagining it with an actual oxide compute sled. Um, people are asking like, wait a minute, can I just get the shirt?
Do I have to go to the conference? It's like an online conference. We're not taking attendance. So yes, like you get like, I mean, do you need me to spell it out for you?
I mean, you can just, uh, yeah, yes, you can get the shirt and then like, you can also go to the free online conference, but you can, and then you can just like, you know, work on the conference and get, and you can get an amazing shirt. So yes, anyone get the shirt will be, uh, they will be packed by hand by my children. Um,
They are my own children, so this is not – before anyone busts out the labor law on me, which my kids do all the time, it's like my own kids, all legal.
So if you get a note in the package that says I'm being held hostage at a computer factory, you know who it's from.
I know which one did it. I know which one did it. If you get a note – okay, yeah, this is a good point, Adam. I'm glad you're bringing this up. No one is being held against their will, despite the note that my 17-year-old may try to slide in there.
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.
As it turns out, like labor law is pretty much all repealed for your own kids. I mean, God bless it. Otherwise, like our kids would all be like little attorneys. They'd have like, what do you know? I don't know. Why am I having to go through your lawyer to ask you to unload the dishwasher? This is not an ocean of, Oh, come on. This dishwasher is all right. Maybe this one is, but.
It's going to be... The conference is free. The t-shirt is not free, but it's pretty cheap, I think.
I'm not sure I saw that through the sign-up process.
I don't know that they will be... Adam, I think these things are going to sell out. Not to be too exclusive about it, but I do think... I don't remember paying for anything, but maybe I did.
I don't know. Somebody get me offline and tell me whether or not I'm getting a shirt.
Happy to pay.
I don't remember if I did or not.
Is it in the email?
Well, yeah, we may have. And we have resisted. I have to say, this is like the first time we've made an Oxide shirt publicly available. We're excited. And it's a great shirt. I think it's going to be fun. It'll be an interesting experiment. I hope other things experiment like this. I would like to go to other experiments like this.
So if other folks, in terms of when will the shirts be shipped out, when will the shirts be shipped out?
We don't even know when they're arriving in our office.
I know. I think we are still waiting for them to arrive. I mean, they're en route.
In other words, we've heard conference organizers talk about burnout, and we've been really careful to avoid that.
Well played. Yes. We're very mindful of this burnout problem. And therefore, first, my children will be doing the work. So just that's presupposed.
at an undetermined time in the future, the future.
Exactly. So, wow. This is the, it's like, wow, this is the most, thank God this unproduced conference. I don't, not only do I not have imposter syndrome, I'm getting these guys won't get burned out because they don't seem to be doing any work. I found my email.
I'll just update you. It's all safe. I am getting a shirt. Okay, good. There you go.
People wanted that yellow shirt. That is a collector's item, Adam, and yours is in good shape. Mine's a little threadbare.
Pretty good shape. It must have shrunk.
That's the only explanation.
The shirt has gotten much smaller over the years. That's the only thing that makes sense. Um, but it was, uh, it's a lot of fun and this is going to be, so we're, we're trying to like get it all. Um, we'll see, we're obviously going to drop something on the, we're not going to, you can't get it all. You can't, um, you have to give up something.
I think that's the, and you have to kind of know what you're trying to go do. Um, and I think for this, it's like, we want to talk about detrace, which is gonna be fun. Um, so, um, but, um, if you, if folks do get the opportunity, I mean, I assume, uh, Steven, that you've not talked about conference burnout, um,
Um, that's surely you must be, uh, I mean, I know it's a lot of work to put on Oktoberfest every year and I'm sure every year you're like, why am I doing this again?
Um, yeah, I mean, yeah, the burnout is a real thing. Um, the thing that's helped the most is just that, um, you know, we've, we've brought on people to sort of offload, um,
in a bunch of the heavy lifting um so i'm not dealing you know so like i said that first year i did like way too much of it and slept for 14 hours or whatever um and these days you know there's entire portions of it where people will come up and say hey this was great and whatever i'm like i had no idea that was a thing literally nothing to do with it so yeah you try to offload as much as you can but you know there's still pieces that are just sort of highly
I just take a ton of time, right? So, you know, speaker selection is all me. And, you know, there's a lot of communication. There's back and forth. Like this year in particular, because of the macroeconomic, we had a ton of people who couldn't make it because they lost their job or changed jobs or whatever. And so...
you know, you're trying to juggle all these talks and, you know, sort of make sure that you are, um, you know, sort of hitting the marks that you want to sort of make, you know, with respect to diversity of speakers. And so, yeah, there's a, it's a lot of overhead. Um,
And I frequently say that my favorite time of the event is like two hours in, because at that point, anything that hasn't been done yet, it just isn't going to get done. It's a lost cause. It's like, yep, we had one year where it was like, you know, I, I shouldn't say we, I forgot all the power cables. It was like, okay, we don't have power.
Two hours in is also when the beer, I think, is served at lunch.
Kelly had a very important point. Yes.
But yeah, sort of organizer burnout is definitely a real thing.
Well, so all the more reason to be grateful for... And I think you also have to be like, you can never take these conferences for granted because no conference is going to go on forever. And we should all be grateful for them when we have them. And I certainly was extremely grateful for those years of surge, Theo, and
I'm very, very grateful for Monctoberfest, as I've told you repeatedly, Steve, and I think I've given the talks that are most personally important to me at Monctoberfest, in part because they're talks that you explicitly asked me to give, which I would also really encourage conference organizers to do.
If there's a talk you want to see, go find the person you want to give it and ask them to give it, because they may not even... Certainly for the talks you've asked me to give, it has not occurred to me to give a talk on them. And they've ended up being really, really important.
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.
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.
Yeah. Well, and, and sort of, we, we do the opposite almost in the sense that, I mean, we probably have one or two speakers every year who have never given a talk before. Right. And it's like, you know, maybe there'll be good, you know, sort of, maybe they'll, they'll, you know, sort of, you know, struggle, but they got to learn.
And, you know, when, when we give people that opportunity and as I've told people, you know, first time speakers before, I'm like, look, you're, you're here. We picked you because of, you know, this, this, it's important that, you know, sort of we hear whatever the subject is. Right. And, you know, we, we care about the delivery.
We want the delivery to be as good as possible, but that, you know, for our audience in particular and that size of event and so on, that's not, that's not a priority for me. I don't, I don't really look at that.
Yeah. And we, we definitely, in terms of like, I mean, this is not a problem, but when you are oversubscribed, I mean, Adam, like we were with systems we love, where I had, I talk about like a one-time bounty of like the old, like we have unspent marketing dollars, just absolute music to my ears. So we're like, can you spend $40,000 on a conference? I'm like a hundred percent. Absolutely.
You've come to the right person.
Just to pause for a second. Cause you put on a great conference, like a one and done that, but that systems we love was just a conference.
That was, that was so much fun. That was so much fun, and it was like one and done. I kind of had an idea of maybe we'd do it, but it did end up being one and done. That one, I think, actually, the thing that I am proudest of there was how we selected talks, actually. We were blind. I thought it was really important to be blind and to have people just submit their proposals.
And then we had a huge number of people who wanted to talk, which is great. And then whittled it down to the point where we still had three times the number of applicants or twice maybe the number of applicants as we had spots. And then we unblinded and looked at other things, including we wanted to get some first-time speakers up on stage. And that was a lot of fun. That was a good day.
It was great.
Yeah, incredible. Yeah.
That was Systems We Love, and that was in 2016, I think. But we kind of had the idea of taking it on the road. We did Systems We Love in Minneapolis, which was fun. But then the unspent marketing dollars problem, that kind of went away, as it turns out. It turns out if you spend the marketing dollars, you no longer have the unspent marketing dollars.
And then, of course, everyone adjusts their budgets next year to make sure that doesn't happen. So that's kind of what happened there. I will say, actually, a problem with... So was briefly a problem with Systems We Love. The talks, we had lost the videos for a bit.
Um, and the, because when you have, they were on Vimeo and they were on kind of a corporate account and then a bunch of us had left and they, you know, changed to a free plan and then Vimeo started deleting stuff. But we, uh, there were some terrific folks inside of joint. Thank you very much. You know, you are who rescued those videos. Um, but then we did not do that for detrace.com for 2016.
YouTube.com 2016 videos are lost, unfortunately. So I would say it's really important when you please upload those videos to YouTube and make sure that they've got... And please, if you haven't, donate to the Internet Archive, which I have more than once. It has saved my bacon. when somebody has deleted... Can I just say, actually, may I make a quick PSA, Adam?
Because this has happened to me a couple of times. If you record a talk at a conference... you are engaged in a social contract with the person who you recorded. And you, this is Mike.
You're asking me to, as your lawyer, you're asking me to vet.
That's my lawyer. I want you to, well, I have had this happen a couple of times where people have deleted the only recordings of talks that I gave. Because I don't give the same talk twice, and it has been the Internet Archive that has absolutely bailed me out and has allowed me to restore those talks. And in some cases, those talks were really personally important.
Um, and I, you, you just, you have a responsibility to a speaker when you, you, you've got like a part of them that they've given you as part of that talk. And, uh, you just, just, you can't destroy someone's art and you can't just, anyway, that's what I have to say about that. Okay. I feel better. I got that out.
Good. Good.
Just, Also, Vimeo. If anyone works for Vimeo and can help us restore to the... But I think these things are lost, unfortunately.
Just to go on the Wayback Machine, the Java 1 keynote that I got to participate in was in real... Oh, yes. We can't get out of here without talking about that. Was in real media format. And I have it downloaded. Don't worry.
Do you have it?
Yeah, I have it. I have not watched it.
Okay. I think that the, in terms of, of extremes in terms of like, so Theo, you gave a talk to, was it 4,000 people, 2,000 people, Apache con big, a lot of people drinking Mai Tai. Um, And I feel I've given talks in rooms of like a thousand plus, but Adam, I think you take the crown, at least among the two of us, certainly. It's not really fair.
I mean, I gave like five, ten minutes at Java 1, and it was kind of hyperventilating when they were talking about the... whatever it was, 30,000 people in the room, and then even more so on the 200,000 people online. But it was a big room.
It was a very big room. It's the biggest possible room at Moscone, and it was packed to the rafters. I mean, there were 10,000 people in the room. More, I think. And you chose that moment to have... The longest hair that I've... I mean, it was singular. Yeah. It was amazing. Yeah, it was a choice.
And then you gave an amazing demo, an amazing demo showing a code flow from Java into the operating system library and into the operating system kernel in like one unit. It was just amazing. It's great. Underappreciated by those tens of thousands, perhaps, but I appreciated it. Everyone else fixated on this wild man hair that you had. But I mean, you had such mad scientist vibes. It was great.
I mean, it really was. It was great.
I could have really parlayed that hair into something.
That's right. So that's, you know, I think that I'm hoping that you're going to have a new hairstyle. You're going to reveal here. I'm looking forward to it.
Stay tuned.
Well, um, really appreciate it, Theo and, and Stephen Kelly. And thank you so much for, uh, helping us talk about, about the conferences. And I think that, you know, Stephen, I like your way of phrasing it. The conferences either need to kind of be small and tight and intimate or online or huge.
Um, I think that those are the, um, conferences are changing, but, um, the need for them has not gone away. Uh, and they still, um, we're looking forward to our online conference. You can kind of join us, get a, get a banger of a shirt, um, and watch our, watch our trust fall here, stage dive. Um, but, uh, looking, uh, looking forward to it and Adam can't wait to see the new hairstyle.
Should be fun.
All right. Thanks everybody.