Software Conferences
the thing I like about javascript conferences is that they only have one room for talks but they just get whoever’s on the mic at any given time to hand it over when they need time to set something up, so you can quickly catch loads of talks so long as you don’t mind that they’re in kind of a jumbled order
the thing I like about C conferences is that if you find the end of a line and stand two spaces behind it, the building will explode
the thing I like about Erlang conferences is that if anything goes wrong in one of the rooms, everyone will just leave, get back into the room, and pretend like nothing happened
i can’t remember what I liked about memcached conferences because there was a power outage
the thing I like about rust conferences is that they’re a huge amount of effort to set up but once they do they run really smoothly
the thing I like about PHP conferences is that they’re easy for anybody to set up and that it’s really hard to predict what will happen at them, which is also a thing that a lot of people do not like about PHP conferences
the thing I like about Go conferences is that they’re exactly like C conferences, but with a guy who comes around and collects the garbage every now and again
the thing I like about Postgres conferences is the consistency, but they only ever throw the one and honestly if they can’t find a bigger venue they’re going to start running out of space
i’m not such a big fan of AWS conferences, they seem reasonably priced at first but then you wander from one region to another and suddenly you owe them fourty eight thousand dollars
i’ve never managed to get in to a RabbitMQ conference but I’ve had a great time just waiting in line for one
I wasn’t sure which mastodon conference to attend, there were so many and most of them seemed like they were run by amateurs, so I just went to the biggest one
the thing I like about lisp conferences is that there aren’t a lot of standards or guidelines for them so each of the big ones just kind of makes up its own rules
the thing I like about retro emulation conferences is that you go into a huge, modern conference hall and they’ve set up a perfect recreation of a conference from 1993 in there, all the way down to the carpeting
the thing I like about roguelike conferences is that if you miss a talk you just have to leave
the thing I like about VC-funded conferences is how fun they are in the first few years, before they inevitably need to justify their massive investment and start to get weird
the thing I like about C# conferences is how much they improved over Java conferences, which they were clearly modeled after, but honestly I haven’t seen or thought about either in years and I think I’m a lot happier for it
the thing I like about scrum conferences is that they’ve clearly never put any more than two weeks worth of effort into planning them so they’re always just all over the place
(I would, of course, refuse to attend any scrum conference that took more than 2 weeks to plan: that would just be a waterfall conference and who wants to go to one of those?)
I attended a pure functional programming conference and as a result I changed my mind about functional programming, which , when I think about it, means it can’t have been a pure functional programming conference after all.
The thing I like about quantum computing conferences is that they’re run in a lot of different states at the same time
The thing I liked about AI conferences in the 80s were that you could set your booth up in a part of the conference hall that nobody could get to, and, in doing so, bring the entire convention to a halt.