Conference 0.1

Ah conferences. They are ultimately undone by the fact that hotels haven't much changed the way conferences have worked in years. The biggest change has been getting wireless connectivity to handle the masses that need Internet all the time. Indeed, for a tech conference, that's what people crave.

Here's a typical situation. You have three rooms, or maybe four, and one talk is really popular. The rest are so-so. And wow, just no place to sit. It's hoped that all talks are about the same.

There's no simple way to redistribute the seats, no polite way to deal with a talk that seems boring, no way to flip from talk to talk to talk, short of seating everyone in their own room, with their own close captioned feed, and then they would lack the immediacy of talking to the person up front.

I was sitting in a talk by Andrea O. K. Wright. I'm sure she's an accomplished developer, and it helps to have a woman in a field that seems utterly dominated by men, but why oh why can't she be a better speaker? I know it's a lot to ask that someone be both a good coder and a good speaker, but it can really help.

I was sitting listening to a talk by Nathan Sobo. I mean, he's talking about frickin' parsing! It seems to be a solved problem, except he has a way to move beyond regexp (though to be fair, most parsers can do more than regexps--it's composition that's probably more interesting). In any case, he was a compelling speaker, did a live coding session that didn't suck.

Did I mention I was sitting by Obie Fernandez. Now, if you had asked me yesterday, nay, even this morning, who the hell Obie was, I couldn't tell you. To be frank, I can't even tell you now, except that he had his book sitting out titled The Rails Way (I own The Ruby Way so I know this book was out there, but had not thought it was published). Obie had his unique John Hancock on his nametag, his schedule, and so forth.

This is Rubyconf for you. You can bump into "famous" folks and not even know it, and they might think (haha) that they are similarly sitting by someone famous, except I happen to like sitting up front.

Sometimes I feel, when I attend these conferences, that it's a little like attending a physics conference. I feel like an outsider, an interloper. I don't play enough with Ruby nor Rails to really get what I need to out of these conferences. These conferences aren't particularly aimed at beginners (though David Black, he of the Amish beard, made a game attempt, but realized that running a free-form session, as appealing as that may be, really requires a bit more direction--I could probably suggest a way to do it. Instead, it turned out to be a crowd that wanted a break from the talks, and were pretty knowledgeable. A tough bind to be in, I'd say).

But then, I get to meet some folks that are learning Ruby too. The real problem is that these conferences range the entire gamut, from Ruby power coders to Ruby wannabe coders, and no one knows which one is which.

I see some of the same faces I saw at Railsconf at Rubyconf, even though it's a trip from one coast to the other. Apparently, DHH doesn't attend Rubyconf, though it would be a bit of a sin not to have Railsconf without DHH. I suspect he's given a pretty penny to show up.

Anyway, back to the theme. We deal with the most modern of technologies, but it seems so much easier when it's bits. It's so much harder when it's physical sites. Even if people have great idea for how to improve presentations, the implementation is the bottleneck. It costs too much, and so hotels simply don't bother. They already find it painful to switch 300 dollar televisions for 1000 dollar televisions. The furniture that the TVs fit in simply can't accomodate 32, 40, 46 inch televisions, and they aren't prepared to ditch that too.