search

mikeal / nodeconf2014

NodeConf 2014 Organizing and Planning.
7 stars 1 forks source link

Post Mortem #43

Open mikeal opened 10 years ago

mikeal commented 10 years ago

Ok, time for the post mortem. Let's discuss:

mikeal commented 10 years ago

What worked really well

Assigning lodges prior to NodeConf rather than sorting at registration was a lot better, and allowed us to use the capacity much better. I'm not the biggest fan of the way we had to do it, with a million ticket types, but a big improvement over last year for sure.

What did not work

I thought that having breaks lead in to the meals would stagger the attendees better so that we could stretch out the time the kitchen staff had to get food out but it didn't work. Next year we may have to just give half the attendees different meal times.

Can't rely on the internet ever again. Next year we should go with with:

What we forgot to bring and had to get at the last second.

  • Sun Screen
  • Enough soda (next year we should have Costco deliver it)
  • Extra towels
  • Linens and blankets, we were within just a few of running out entirely at the camp.

Comments/Thoughts

I'm so impressed with all of the mentors. Ya'll killed it. We also just doubled the NodeSchool courses, so well done :)

That said, I don't think that next year we will have 8 new things to do.

Even this year, we were seeing a division between people newer to node and those that were much more comfortable. In the end, a few sessions just didn't apply to every attendee (although it was a different set for each attendee). At the same time, I was really impressed with how accessible we made certain subjects to people who wouldn't have felt confident doing them otherwise. People who may have never opted to try and write C++, make robots, or understand shaders left feeling pretty confident even though a few attendees that were newer to node dropped off. This will be an even bigger challenge next year so I'm already starting to think about some format changed.

justinabrahms commented 10 years ago

What worked really well

I thought the timing of talks worked really well. There were breaks right as people seemed fatigued and they came back refreshed. I thought the food was much better than I expected (and better than average conference food).

Windows support was really great, especially @rvagg (et al)'s goingnative, which I was pleasantly surprised at. In other conferences I've been in, people often punt on it. "Oh. Windows. Sorry. Here's an ubuntu live cd for the day" and I saw a few people in particular surprised they were able to participate with their windows computers.

I liked that there were so many families around. It really increased the feeling of the node community.

The breadth and depth of the activities were great (dancing / smores / foursquare / hacking / drinking / playing with clay / etc).

What did not work

I think it would have been helpful to provide a bit more information around what things you were expected to know before workshoppers. For instance, I would have liked to review some geometry basics (which I'm woefully out of date on) before attempting the glsl workshopper.

Installation as mentioned. In particular with the goingnative one, the first time you run node-gyp, it needs to download a multi-megabyte file to fetch the development headers of node source. This is something that could be fixed upstream (maybe a separate release target of just headers, or similar?)

Announcements were difficult. Often, the megaphone was like listening to charlie brown voices. It would be nice if there was a local DNS entry that we could go to and see the latest announcements for the conference/camp.

Other feedback/comments.

I was blown away by this conference. I agree that those running workshoppers were great. I'd also like to say that you, @mikeal, did a great job!

othiym23 commented 10 years ago

  • What worked really well

  • The workshoppers, of course. Once I stopped freaking about not having my workshopper done and started thinking about the conference as a live-fire beta test for getting the workshopper on nodeschool.io, I got a lot more comfortable.

  • The variety of topics. I have more to say on this a bit further down, but I think the topics ended up having something for just about everybody.

  • Having breaks between sessions built into the schedule. This probably seems really obvious, but the lack of built-in (short) breaks pretty much guaranteed that JSConf's schedule started drifting, which can't happen when you've got people rotating between sessions like we did.

  • Allowing people to choose what they hacked on the second day. I was literally stunned that my classroom was full at 9:30. Debugging isn't sexy, but people were clearly into it, as Ben and I were kept busy pretty much the whole time.

  • Once everybody got on WCAir, the wireless was pretty much trouble-free in all the shared spaces I was in. This made it pretty easy to move files around in classes (for instance).

  • What did not work

  • Fucking internet. I'm pretty sure we were getting QoSed upstream, because even when nobody could download anything, my ssh connection to my home server was rock-solid and lag-free (neither of which are true at the npm offices, fwiw). Either way, it was an entirely predictable breakdown, and it felt like it was an even bigger mess this year than last. It might even be worth handing out thumb drives to EVERYBODY with at least the basics, like node and npm installers (@rvagg, is there a way to preseed gyp's build directory, so people don't have to redownload Node for gyp?), because in my first few sessions a bunch of people were actually sigh installing Node.

  • For yet another year, the beautiful dream of a site-wide, local registry failed to materialize. I think it can be done, but I think there needs to be a deadline at least two weeks ahead of the conference to make sure that it's going to be ready / tested / etc. In our (npm's) defense, we were incredibly busy and weren't really aware that we were expected to come up with something until fairly late in the game. It's a bit much to expect a campground's internet connection to be able to handle the traffic of at least 300 technical professionals, so we should absolutely expect to have something like this ready, but it needs to be made more of a central part of the planning process.

  • What we forgot to bring and had to get at the last second.

  • Not every classroom had a whiteboard. Thanks to the network problems, every classroom needed one. We had to wing it with the large Post-It pad from the dining hall that @nvcexploder "borrowed".

  • I mostly drank water all weekend. The options for non-coffee / non-alcohol drinkers were pretty limited, as much as I enjoyed getting in touch with my inner 6th grader with the Capri Suns. Bottles of sparkling water as well as sodas would have been appreciated.

  • What we should bring next year.

  • Yet even more power strips, especially those with very long cords. It's still a challenge to get power to everyone who wants it, and with the workshopper format, where everybody's on their computer all day, it's a little awkward.

  • Maybe each room of mentors does one first session where the whole plan is to get everyone's prerequisites installed and configured, especially if we have a way to push out the workshoppers to everyone at once and deal specifically with environment issues.

  • More (floating?) mentors with Windows expertise. I could definitely have used some Windows help in many of my sessions. Most of that's on me to do a better job of preparing, but Windows experts I could call on would have sped things up in many cases.

That said, I don't think that next year we will have 8 new things to do.

Then you're not thinking very hard. There are at least two more workshoppers I'm going to put together now (working with OS-level stuff and profiling & performance), mostly so there's a clear progression to get people ready for the debugging workshopper. Things sort out into either "expert" or "beginning" levels, and we need more intermediate material.

Overall, the conference killed it. It was one of the most exhausting weekends I've had since last year about this time, but I think people had a really good time and learned a lot, and your ongoing style of organizing things just enough to get everyone to figure it out and make things happen continues to come together in an effective way. On to next year!

justinabrahms commented 10 years ago

re: not having 8 new things to do, I'm going to cajole @chrisdickinson into helping me create a workshopper around mutating AST for fun and profit... so we have at least 3 ;)

dominictarr commented 10 years ago

The workshopper based format was a lot less exausting than what we did last year, and as a consequence I enjoyed this year much more. I saw a tweet that someone wanted a talk and was disapointed there where none. I'm not really that big a fan of talks... how ever, what I do really like is a discussion - i.e. a talk to about 30 people at once - this size means people feel comfertable to ask questions at any time, and if one person is unsure about something you can bet that other people are too. The result is a much more effective communication, and the "speaker" getting more ideas from the audience... Someof us went off and had our own mini p2p conf after dinner on the second day.

adding analytics to workshopper so that we can learn common mistakes, etc, will help us make the lessons much better I think.

feross commented 10 years ago

re: not having 8 new things to do

I still hope to do a webrtc workshopper, so we have at least 4 now! Looking forward to using @hughsk's web-based workshopper (once it's split out into its own package).

alanshaw commented 10 years ago

what worked well

Workshopper - I don't think attendees would have got as much out of each workshop if they weren't workshopper driven. Directed learning at your own pace ftw.

People stayed over breaks/lunch - that means either they really enjoyed it, or sessions were too short. I like to think it was the former.

We updated our workshopper to udp broadcast over the network when someone completes an exercise. Inevitably hackable - one group hacked it, and that was awesome - but it meant we had a leaderboard of how many exercises people had completed and we could tell if a group were falling behind during a session. Attendees on average got about half way through the workshopper. Highest 6 of 9.

We got a picture of everyone in the workshop! http://tableflip.github.io/nodeconf-highfive-pics/

Evening campfire activities were a lot of fun. The audience participation gameshow style things were funny, engaging and inclusive for everyone.

what didn't work

Local npm mirror - would have solved all the internet problems but it wasn't sync-ing with the real registry and of course we published updates to our workshopper the evening before :) I wasn't able to publish to the local mirror (possibly my fault) so, like most, we resorted to a local file server with a zip.

Some were frustrated by not finishing workshoppers in the time allocated - perhaps it needed to be communicated better that they are taster sessions, and that they can/should be continued the next day/in your own time.

What we should bring next year

The British guys =D

Get attendees to install a nodeconf2015 module next year ahead of time...like nodeconf2013?

In most sessions we had to share a sparkfun kit between two people. This was actually a great way to get people to pair program and something we've had a lot of success with at nodeschool events we've run before. However, the kits only just went around the number of attendees and are getting a little worn. I'd suggest stock checking and investing in a bunch of new kits next time around.

Talks/discussions to break the day up? Live NodeUp around the camp fire?

Other feedback/comments

Thank you @rvagg for the amazing workshopper. Thanks @mikeal for ferrying us around before the event to get lumber for the high five machine, special thanks to @rockbot and @wmaxwallace for helping us construct the thing and also many thanks to @rwaldron and the rest of the nodebots team!

\o/ amazing conference, great people, super fun times.

mikeal commented 10 years ago

In most sessions we had to share a sparkfun kit between two people.

I think we actually had a bunch of extras in the barn. There was a giant black case of them and a large box that I think may have been untouched.

Not every classroom had a whiteboard.

Damn, I bought a bunch of stand up whiteboards but I guess they weren't distributed to the classes that needed them most.

8 new things

What I actually meant by this was that, of all the things people might want to do at the conference, many of them will be existing workshoppers and not new ones so I expect that the structure will need to change.

jedireza commented 10 years ago

What worked really well

I enjoyed the un-labeled (mystery) schedule. Each talk came with a little surprise since I didn't know what was next. I might not have chosen some, but I'm really glad I saw them all. Very cool.

It was nice that even though my SO was doing the programming track, that we did them at different times. :+1:

Like Forrest said, "Allowing people to choose what they hacked on the second day."... yes that was awesome.

What we should bring next year.

Red wine

Re: New workshoppers

I mentioned to Max once that an EventEmitter workshopper would be nice for some of the newer folks, he seemed to think it was a good idea. I'm hoping to make one, but someone please feel free.

Other feedback/comments.

This was my first NodeConf and the best tech event I've ever been to. When I mentioned on Twitter if the 2015 registration form was up, I meant it as a big compliment.

mikeal commented 10 years ago

Red wine

We actually had red wine, we even had a bunch left over, but we were short on corkscrews so it didn't make it out enough :( Fix for next year: many corkscrews!

rosskukulinski commented 10 years ago

I'm working on a blog post on my first-time experience of nodeconf (hint: loved it). My biggest qualm was the choice of dates. Having the event over a national holiday weekend was a big turn-off for me and my family.

justinabrahms commented 10 years ago

Speaking of blog posts: http://quickleft.com/blog/nodeconf-2014-a-story-of-aspiration-and-community On Jul 9, 2014 10:46 PM, "Ross Kukulinski" notifications@github.com wrote:

I'm working on a blog post on my first-time experience of nodeconf (hint: loved it). My biggest qualm was the choice of dates. Having the event over a national holiday weekend was a big turn-off for me and my family.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/mikeal/nodeconf2014/issues/43#issuecomment-48567401.

chrisdickinson commented 10 years ago

What worked really well

Through the hard work of @hughsk and @mikolalysenko, we got an OpenGL program that didn't exist before a month ago to work on multiple different kinds of hardware and operating machines! The future is a neat place to live in. A lot of people were doing really cool things of their own with WebGL -- including someone who's using browserify in a game on steam! Folks seemed to have a good amount of energy throughout the day (which I suspect was due to canny placement of breaks).

What did not work

Windows, for the first few sessions, had some issues -- mostly related to path depth; but there were intermittent issues with Windows XP not being able to browserify the menu. The harder problem for me on the day of, I think, was keeping track of which issues were appearing with the workshopper, what configurations they appeared on, and which had been solved by the quick action of other proctors of the workshop. I think analytics -- even something quick like having workshopper try to broadcast out a crash report over UDP containing stacktrace + os+osversion+node version -- might be useful for the future. There's a fine line to walk with regards to privacy and security, but having the ability to hook into a stream of all of the errors that are happening to a workshop on the local network would be really neat/useful.

What we forgot to bring and had to get at the last second.

At PDXNode's workshopper sessions, I've desired having a sponsor give attendees a USB key prepopulated with all of the workshoppers. @tmpvar saved the day for the glslify workshopper by letting us use his (incredibly stylish) USB keys. The logistics of getting something like this together would be difficult to work out, but I feel like it could smooth out a lot of the bumps in the early sessions of nodeconf.

Nodeconf is a great place to introduce new workshoppers -- and there's a lot of value on both sides to get people running through them at the conference -- but most of the valuable bugs appear post-installation, so getting folks there quicker would be rad. (Other implications: workshoppers would have to be done by a deadline earlier than usual, likely want to run through all workshoppers at a user group beforehand so that the "gold master" workshopper for nodeconf is more likely to work, etc etc. It may just be way too much overhead!)

What we should bring next year.

  • Jugs of cold{{press,brew} coffee, tea}; placed around all of the various workshop rooms.
  • More whiteboard markers.
  • I saw the crate of reusable water bottles -- it might be nice to have those at the check-in table for folks to pick up when they get there.

Other feedback/comments.

Nodeconf continues to be, for me, the best representation of the node community in meat-space form. It's one of the best ambassadors we have for folks coming into the community -- for new programmers as well as seasoned devs. Thanks x1e6 @mikeal for putting this on, thanks to all of the other organizers for running rad workshops, and to all of the attendees for showing up, being awesome, and sticking with us through some of the aforementioned rough parts! :heart:

DTrejo commented 10 years ago

I enjoyed the camp, and it was all very relaxing, the nature, food, etc.

As a node old-timer, and attendee of the node summer camp two years ago:

Summary: I learned much less than I had hoped, and if I had attended workshoppers I would have learned mostly things I already know. Sorry if I sound mean, I don't mean to!

mikeal commented 10 years ago

@DTrejo

less connected to Node Core.

NodeConf SummerCamp was an un-conference about building the future of node. Each year we tried to make it about more than core but it always ended up just being about core. Last year we stopped doing that because so much more was happening than just core, and there was so much more activity going on in the ecosystem.

I did not read anything on the site saying that this would be the format, or that there would not be talks

from the website

NodeConf has a hands-on format. You are introduced to topics by mentors and participate is short workshops where you gain experience in each topic. The content will cover a broad range of topics from hardware to web applications.

The overwhelming reaction we got from last year's NodeConf, the NodeSchool events that have followed, and even this event is that the hands-on format leaves people feeling far more confident in the topics covered than we could ever accomplish with traditional lectures.

You are certainly in the 1% of Node developers in terms of existing competency so I see why some of the content my have been boring outside of "debugging," "shader school," and "going native." Conversely we got some similar feedback from people less experienced with Node that they got a little lost in some of the more advanced sessions. Next year we'll probably find a way to split up the content so that all the sessions a person attends will be relevant to their experience level.

workshops could have been done on my own time

Most people didn't finish more than one workshopper, that's the whole point. The goal is to introduce people to a topic in an environment where mentors can get them past the early problems they might have with it but still be left with something to take home and continue to improve upon.

my SO complained of not enough to do

This year we actually had more going on in the SO and Kids tracks than any previous year. That said, we continue to add more each year and improve the experience. If she has any suggestions for activities that would be fun next year we'd love to hear them, and rest assured there will be even more content in the SO Track next year.

I did not meet or get to know (via talks) many of the people I know and have interacted with on github

My experience having run over a dozen events now is that formal talks actually reduce the amount of interaction between speakers and attendees. Lectures quite literally elevate the presence of the speakers and being that developers are not traditionally outgoing this makes them even more nervous about speaking to them during breaks and social events.

You're the first person I've heard say that the hands-on format combined with the relatively low intensity and intimate social events made it more difficult to connect with people. This is quite interesting feedback and I'd like to talk to you more, maybe in person, about why this may have been your experience so that I can find a creative way to change it next year.

aemaier commented 10 years ago

What worked really well: Great to have more facilitators for the SO Track; Having a few bottle openers attached to each drinks bin; Walkie talkie for communication

What did not work: We need to make sure everyone knows that linens are provided, I got lots of last minute calls about that. Burying the info at the bottom of one email is not enough.

What we forgot to bring and had to get at the last second: Skewers for s'mores (but the camp has a set, so we can notify them that we want to use them); Bottle openers--especially corkscrews for the wine (again, the camp has a supply of bottle openers we can borrow, but it's better to provide our own so we don't have to worry about losing them)

What we should bring next year: Flash lights (mini lights would be a great sponsor item!)

Other feedback/comments: Designate staff members ahead of time for fire duty. Consider an ice breaker activity on the first day to help make the conf more comfortable for newcomers, especially since so many attendees already know each other. Organize staff activity ahead of time! Organize art supplies prior to buying more.