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Organizer of Chrome Dev Summit here. Please do keep sending feedback and thoughts through on how can keep improving. In terms of session length, I can see tha

by kinlan 9y ago

Organizer of Chrome Dev Summit here. Please do keep sending feedback and thoughts through on how can keep improving. In terms of session length, I can see that being an issue. We had strict union regulations, and a lot of content to get through and I took the decision for more but shorter length talks that we can expand with textual content after the event. We also tried to keep the theme for day 1 to everything we've learnt in the last year, so what is the new minimum bar for web experiences, how to load them quickly and how we've done it in the real world with commerce and media experiences and wordpress and pwa. On day 2 I wanted us to showcase where we think the web could be heading in the next year, specifically with more of a focus on developer experience (devtools etc, polymer, lit etc) Not saying we hit all those goals, but I do feel pretty happy with the event as a whole.

inglor 9y ago
Hey, thanks for taking feedback! As someone who was invited to attend - I really wished the talks were more low level and technical. I'd really enjoy talks about how things are implemented in Chrome, how the underlying APIs (for PWAs for example) work and so on.
- kinlan 9y ago
  We are talking about that for next year. We need to do a better job at audience segmentation because we have ranges from senior dev to student, and CxO's etc and that's roughly why we stay a tad higher level with a lot of case studies. We might end up with different days or different events for the audiences.
  - ldd 9y ago
    I wish to voice the opposite view from OP: I love the fact that you stay at a 'higher level'. My primary focus when watching these talks is knowing the current state of chrome, and some information directly from the source on what you worked and will be working in the future. Because of this, I want to say thank you precisely for not giving more lower-level details in your talks.
    - kinlan 9y ago
      :) thank you - it's a balance...
  - jsmeaton 9y ago
    This is an issue with nearly every conference I've been to. Most attendees seem ok with higher level talks, though whenever there is a deeply technical and interesting topic the room is always overflowing. If there are multiple tracks on the same day, maybe consider a high and low level track? The only conference I've been to that felt targeted to me was Django Under The Hood, which is billed as very technical talks about the innards of a framework.
- dalmaer 9y ago
  A good place to see those talks is BlinkOn: https://www.youtube.com/user/blinkontalks https://www.youtube.com/user/blinkontalks
pas 9y ago
(I've asked this on Reddit too, but maybe others want to chime in.) Maybe somewhere in that 10 hour someone talks about it, but let me ask about this problem: Google is big, and has many sides, fronts, faces and eyes; what is Chrome, where is Chrome in relation to all the other web-related, web-facing web-targeted things? Where is Chrome, Polymer, Angular, and Android compared to each other (and the big Google itself)? Should I wait for Angular to adopt the Chrome PWA guidelines? Should I just wait for the Android team to stop developing the native APIs and focus on the WebView and make the whole Android platform more web-compatible? If now, what's Chrome's thoughts on what these other teams/projects/products/faces-of-Google are doing?
- kinlan 9y ago
  That's a good question that I don't know how to answer clearly. We are a big company with many facets and no clear web direction owner and also lots of platforms (android, web, assistant etc). Generally, it's lots of groups working to reach users on the web. Chrome works on what it can work on and tries to influence other teams as best it can. Angular team has been very supportive of the PWA story, but it wasn't clear in this conference for sure. For those not at the event, we had a large forum area where we had more Google teams (AMP and Angular) and many other browsers have a space to talk to developers.... But this wasn't clear by just looking at the videos. I think the big thing for me, is we are not going to say don't do Android. We should be clearer on why things like Trusted Web activities help you deliver web experiences with native though and we can keep being clearer about why we think the web is good and how best to deploy on it.
  - pjmlp 9y ago
    Regarding Android, it always feels strange to sometimes watch jabs at native development from Web talks at IO, as if Android wasn't a Google product.
    - kinlan 9y ago
      Do you have specific examples? I know we frequently talk about the benefits of distribution and reach of the web in comparison to other platforms including Android.
nojvek 9y ago
I would just say, please don't forget the people who make dev summit great. Especially the underrepresented females. There were open complaints on Twitter about the dev summit organizers being sexist. I won't go into details but multiple female Google employees have voiced their opinions regarding this. Don't be that guy.
- kinlan 9y ago
  I saw your email to the team and I have reply coming shortly (if it wasn't sent out already). For context, for everyone on the thread. We had a wrap-up video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n69vkYvo9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n69vkYvo9g) of the event that didn't have the MC's included and given they were the face of the event, it was a mistake that we made and we didn't have time to fix and are in the process of rectifying. We also had a dedicated video planned just for the MC's but it takes time to create and put together.
xenadu02 9y ago
> We had strict union regulations Can you clarify what this means? In my experience it means paying for more audio, video, and venue staff because the existing folks have been on duty all day but the conference organizers don’t want to pay or can’t afford to pay for a) more people or b) overtime I’ve done a bit of mix engineering and conference organizers are very myopic: why can’t I be as excited about their stuff as they are? They don’t think about what happens when this is your day job and if you don’t bring the hammer down you’ll end up working unpaid overtime every day of every week because every conference thinks they are the hottest most exciting shit since sliced bread. One can assume Google is able to pay more but made the perfectly reasonable business decision not to. The mystery for me is why you’re blaming it on the union? Perhaps the venue completely prohibits longer days but every rate sheet I’ve ever seen simply quotes higher prices if you exceed a “normal” conference day length. (I’m genuinely curious here but also being slightly sensitive: there are certainly abusive unions - Philly conference centers come to mind where you have to pay master electricians to carry tables and chairs into the venue - but it is far more common for people to be cheap-asses & blame the unions)
- kinlan 9y ago
  I'm not blaming the union if it came out that way it wasn't intentional. I had to work around a number of constraints, with timings based on regulations as well as rates, budget constraints and other factors that came in at the last minute, as well as people on our sides own ability to work the long hours and I chose to balance of them all and it meant having talks at 30 minutes and the breaks based around all these factor.... I mean, I am happy with the content and the pace and the quality of the work from everyone involved especially the event crew. It's just a factor how we chose to run the event and the content and that is what I was trying to articulate.
  - xenadu02 9y ago
    That makes sense; as I said there are perfectly valid business (or other) reasons to limit the length of each day. FWTW: I don’t see a problem with shorter sessions.
dmitriid 9y ago
> We also tried to keep the theme for day 1 > On day 2 I wanted us to showcase That's why you run several parallel tracks, each with a separate theme. As an example, see Erlang User Conference programme: http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2017#programme http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2017#programme This way you give people a chance to prepare more specific presentations around a specific theme: tooling, components, apps, deployment, distribution, development, what have you.

by kinlan 9y ago

inglor 9y ago

Hey, thanks for taking feedback! As someone who was invited to attend - I really wished the talks were more low level and technical. I'd really enjoy talks about how things are implemented in Chrome, how the underlying APIs (for PWAs for example) work and so on.

kinlan 9y ago
We are talking about that for next year. We need to do a better job at audience segmentation because we have ranges from senior dev to student, and CxO's etc and that's roughly why we stay a tad higher level with a lot of case studies. We might end up with different days or different events for the audiences.
- ldd 9y ago
  I wish to voice the opposite view from OP: I love the fact that you stay at a 'higher level'. My primary focus when watching these talks is knowing the current state of chrome, and some information directly from the source on what you worked and will be working in the future. Because of this, I want to say thank you precisely for not giving more lower-level details in your talks.
  - kinlan 9y ago
    :) thank you - it's a balance...
- jsmeaton 9y ago
  This is an issue with nearly every conference I've been to. Most attendees seem ok with higher level talks, though whenever there is a deeply technical and interesting topic the room is always overflowing. If there are multiple tracks on the same day, maybe consider a high and low level track? The only conference I've been to that felt targeted to me was Django Under The Hood, which is billed as very technical talks about the innards of a framework.
dalmaer 9y ago
A good place to see those talks is BlinkOn: https://www.youtube.com/user/blinkontalks https://www.youtube.com/user/blinkontalks

pas 9y ago

(I've asked this on Reddit too, but maybe others want to chime in.) Maybe somewhere in that 10 hour someone talks about it, but let me ask about this problem: Google is big, and has many sides, fronts, faces and eyes; what is Chrome, where is Chrome in relation to all the other web-related, web-facing web-targeted things? Where is Chrome, Polymer, Angular, and Android compared to each other (and the big Google itself)? Should I wait for Angular to adopt the Chrome PWA guidelines? Should I just wait for the Android team to stop developing the native APIs and focus on the WebView and make the whole Android platform more web-compatible? If now, what's Chrome's thoughts on what these other teams/projects/products/faces-of-Google are doing?

kinlan 9y ago
That's a good question that I don't know how to answer clearly. We are a big company with many facets and no clear web direction owner and also lots of platforms (android, web, assistant etc). Generally, it's lots of groups working to reach users on the web. Chrome works on what it can work on and tries to influence other teams as best it can. Angular team has been very supportive of the PWA story, but it wasn't clear in this conference for sure. For those not at the event, we had a large forum area where we had more Google teams (AMP and Angular) and many other browsers have a space to talk to developers.... But this wasn't clear by just looking at the videos. I think the big thing for me, is we are not going to say don't do Android. We should be clearer on why things like Trusted Web activities help you deliver web experiences with native though and we can keep being clearer about why we think the web is good and how best to deploy on it.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Regarding Android, it always feels strange to sometimes watch jabs at native development from Web talks at IO, as if Android wasn't a Google product.
  - kinlan 9y ago
    Do you have specific examples? I know we frequently talk about the benefits of distribution and reach of the web in comparison to other platforms including Android.

nojvek 9y ago

I would just say, please don't forget the people who make dev summit great. Especially the underrepresented females. There were open complaints on Twitter about the dev summit organizers being sexist. I won't go into details but multiple female Google employees have voiced their opinions regarding this. Don't be that guy.

kinlan 9y ago
I saw your email to the team and I have reply coming shortly (if it wasn't sent out already). For context, for everyone on the thread. We had a wrap-up video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n69vkYvo9g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n69vkYvo9g) of the event that didn't have the MC's included and given they were the face of the event, it was a mistake that we made and we didn't have time to fix and are in the process of rectifying. We also had a dedicated video planned just for the MC's but it takes time to create and put together.

xenadu02 9y ago

> We had strict union regulations Can you clarify what this means? In my experience it means paying for more audio, video, and venue staff because the existing folks have been on duty all day but the conference organizers don’t want to pay or can’t afford to pay for a) more people or b) overtime I’ve done a bit of mix engineering and conference organizers are very myopic: why can’t I be as excited about their stuff as they are? They don’t think about what happens when this is your day job and if you don’t bring the hammer down you’ll end up working unpaid overtime every day of every week because every conference thinks they are the hottest most exciting shit since sliced bread. One can assume Google is able to pay more but made the perfectly reasonable business decision not to. The mystery for me is why you’re blaming it on the union? Perhaps the venue completely prohibits longer days but every rate sheet I’ve ever seen simply quotes higher prices if you exceed a “normal” conference day length. (I’m genuinely curious here but also being slightly sensitive: there are certainly abusive unions - Philly conference centers come to mind where you have to pay master electricians to carry tables and chairs into the venue - but it is far more common for people to be cheap-asses & blame the unions)

kinlan 9y ago
I'm not blaming the union if it came out that way it wasn't intentional. I had to work around a number of constraints, with timings based on regulations as well as rates, budget constraints and other factors that came in at the last minute, as well as people on our sides own ability to work the long hours and I chose to balance of them all and it meant having talks at 30 minutes and the breaks based around all these factor.... I mean, I am happy with the content and the pace and the quality of the work from everyone involved especially the event crew. It's just a factor how we chose to run the event and the content and that is what I was trying to articulate.
- xenadu02 9y ago
  That makes sense; as I said there are perfectly valid business (or other) reasons to limit the length of each day. FWTW: I don’t see a problem with shorter sessions.

dmitriid 9y ago

> We also tried to keep the theme for day 1 > On day 2 I wanted us to showcase That's why you run several parallel tracks, each with a separate theme. As an example, see Erlang User Conference programme: http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2017#programme http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2017#programme This way you give people a chance to prepare more specific presentations around a specific theme: tooling, components, apps, deployment, distribution, development, what have you.