6 ms·

DevDays 2011 is Cancelled

165 points by nsoonhui 15y ago

chunkyslink 15y ago
Nice to see Mr Spolsky taking it on the chin and not making excuses. I would be interested in seeing an online version of any of the presentations. Pretty please ?
- mathattack 15y ago
  Agree on taking responsibility. There are a lot of excuses he could have made: economy, bad PR firm, etc. By taking blame he can now move on to fix things.
  - wisty 15y ago
    Also note, this is a perfect response in a PR crisis - taking responsibility (if not legal responsibility), and not behaving like it's everyone else's fault but your own.
  - pbiggar 15y ago
    I confess I don't understand this mentality. Why do you personally care that Joel took responsibility?
    - mathattack 15y ago
      If I buy something, and the vendor screws up, if they give me a bunch of excuses, I am more likely to think they'll screw up again. If the vendor takes personal responsibility, there is less chance that they'll make the same mistake again.
      - pbiggar 15y ago
        Ah, I didn't get that you had bought a ticket.
        mathattack 15y ago
        In full disclosure I didn't. I am just throwing out opinions from the cheap seats. :-)
- alphabeat 15y ago
  I'm confused. Didn't he put the blame on poor attendance?
  - zachallaun 15y ago
    I'm confused. Did you read just the first sentence? The second: It’s my fault, actually. Followed by an entire post re: errors made in planning DevDays '11.
- garydevenay 15y ago
  I agree. Would have loved to have went to the '09 conference though.
- HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
  @spolsky: I guess you've really taken the locksmith lesson to heart then :-)
rodh257 15y ago
I'd love to see an online conference like http://www.mvcconf.com/ http://www.mvcconf.com/ with the speakers who were signed up giving their prepared talks
damncabbage 15y ago
It's sad, but the price really did kill it for me. I've only ever been to a conference on my employer's dime once. $500 is a big gamble for me. (I understand that companies sending devs to conferences seems to be the Done Thing in the States, but I haven't seen it happen too often in Sydney here.)
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
zdw 15y ago
I love short, vigorous conferences. You get great ideas, and go home feeling energized and ready to try a bunch of new stuff you just learned. Going to longer conferences (like WWDC, etc.) ends up causing brain fatigue after 3rd day of 5 - it's like the Gary Larson "Can I be excused? My brain is full" Far Side comic. Also, the "hallway track" is what I get the most out of - conferences that optimize for that by offering meals and communal events on-site maximize this.
teej 15y ago
Sounds like a classic case of premature scaling. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of-startup-death-premature-scaling/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of...
archangel_one 15y ago
I would have much preferred a $99 conference; I saw the announcement of this year's one and was seriously thinking of attending since I was likely to be geographically nearby this time, but $499 was really a bit much for me. I can drop $99 for a one-off day out, but $499 really seems like you need a company paying your way to it for it to be interesting. I guess this is a big difference between the nature of StackOverflow versus an Oracle Users Conference or similar. Sounds like one major problem is that they really need Joel at the conferences for a bit of "star power", but he obviously doesn't want to spend half his year flying around to SO conferences. Not easily solved, I guess, but I hope they come up with something.
- gecko 15y ago
  If it were me, needing to be at every location would have been a major factor contributing to this change. Part of Joel's shtick for DevDays was that he showed how proper project management and source control (via FogBugz and Kiln) could really help a small team. Kiln was brand-new at the time, and was a big part of the demo, so I thankfully had an excuse to do the European DevDays stops to answer questions and do demos. And it...well, it starts awesome, if you do it right: you get to see a bunch of stuff you've never seen before, you get to fly first-class if you're lucky, and you meet a bunch of brilliant people. And I think Joel really likes speaking; if you feel comfortable talking in front of a crowd, it's awesome to see all those people wanting to hear what you have to say. So in that sense, doing a pile of small DevDays is absolutely wonderful, in my opinion. But then there's dealing with the fact that almost no venue was properly set up properly. That supplies we badly needed didn't ever quite manage to get where they needed to be in a timely manner (or, in the case of Europe, clear customs at all). That a major prop we had was going to have to be driven around London in a truck by yours truly. That we had to have SSDs FedEx'd at tremendous cost because the laptops couldn't comfortably run VMware properly, and that sometimes, it didn't really matter anyway, because something would go wrong with the projector, and you'd end up being forced to use large televisions instead. Or a speaker would cancel and be replaced at the last second by someone else, or the WiFi would just not be there even though it was absolutely required for someone's demo, or half a dozen other things. And that's just the stuff that goes wrong at the time; you're leaving out all the stuff that had to be planned beforehand. This wore on me, and I only had just a few stops. And Joel (and I) did it two years in a row: DevDays first, and the Fog Creek World Tour second. I have to imagine it wore on him, and I think that might go a long way toward explaining why he tried to consolidate the conferences. But Joel does love travel, and I think DevDays were absolutely wonderful conferences, so that may have absolutely nothing to do with it. I think it may just be as simple as what he wrote in the post: that they tried to make it bigger and more conference-like...which in turn, made it Not Really DevDays, at which point it was competing with things like OSCON and Open Source Bridge. That's a tougher market.
AgentConundrum 15y ago
DevDays 2.0 really seemed to be out of touch with the original DevDays concept. As Joel says in the post, $99 was a good amount for someone to be able to just take a day off work and pay for the conference themselves. Had I not lost my job in mid-2009, I was seriously considering attending the one in Toronto. I could have planned a trip home at the same time, and just stopped over in Toronto rather than immediately grabbing a second - considerably smaller - plane the rest of the way. Even had there been a DevDays Toronto again this time, it would have been out of my price range to attend, and it would have meant finding accommodations for a night and all that goes with that. I couldn't have justified it to myself at all. Good on Joel, though, for straight-up admitting to the problems with the new conferences, rather than manufacturing excuses.
logjam 15y ago
I must be out of touch. A price increase of $99 to $499 is not a "modest increase". Come on.
- damncabbage 15y ago
  I think he was being facetious.
  - georgemcbay 15y ago
    I hope he was, but I'm not certain he was. In any case, I can assure everyone out there who doesn't vacation in the Hamptons that a jump from $99 to $499 is an absolutely huge difference, both practically and psychologically. I'm not sure how he couldn't have predicted this outcome.
  - logjam 15y ago
    No, he wasn't. And as numerous people above pointed out, the price killed the deal.
    - damncabbage 15y ago
      And as numerous people above pointed out, ... Including me ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968214 ). I was referring to him calling the price hike a "modest" increase. I read it as him being intentionally inappropriately flippant about the thing that killed the conference (in a mildly humourous and self-effacing manor).
aherlambang 15y ago
Someone should probably do a startup that solves the problem of "overpriced" conferences. This has always been a problem for me when wanting to attend a conferences, first comes the plane ticket, then hotel, and then the conference ticket itself (which sometimes is ridiculously high).
- SoftwareMaven 15y ago
  The problem of "overpriced" conferences is that conferences are really expensive to put on. Everything from from the location to the food costs a lot, and every place has it's particular rules about what you are allowed to bring in versus what they force you to use. And then you have to pay speakers... We are just putting the finishing touches on ProductCamp Utah, and with no profit and no paid speakers, it is still extremely expensive.
  - eschaton 15y ago
    There's a large number of experienced conference runners and planners who will disagree, and collectively have been running inexpensive but good conferences for DECADES. They're called "SMOFs." They run science fiction conventions. (Not "Star Trek" conventions but "science fiction" conventions - books.) And the conventions are not for profit membership organizations typically with hundreds or thousands of members attending over a weekend at a cost of a few tens of dollars each. The SMOFs are generally willing to help others run conferences by giving them advice, doing (paid) consulting work, or even fully (paid) managing conferences. A great example is Expotech, who ran MacHack.
    - akuchling 15y ago
      I was co-chair of Python 2006 & 2007, and in preparation I went to SMOFcon. SF con issues have some relevance to tech cons, but only partially so: * SF cons don't usually provide food for all attendees, which is the big cost driver for tech cons. For PyCon 2011, catering was 54% of the budget. * Tech cons mostly don't have to worry about people in costumes, keeping under-18s out of certain events, or as much rowdy late-night behaviour (e.g. room parties). * Tech cons really, really have to worry about the WiFi network. Recording every presentation may also impose more A/V requirements. Going to SMOFcon was somewhat useful to me, but the differences are significant.
mirkules 15y ago
I have never heard of this event until now. I would love to attend something like this. How/where was this event marketed? Also, $99 sounds like a great price entry point. Defcon started out on the cheap, and a few years later spawned BlackHat. Sounds like a good model to follow.
- tptacek 15y ago
  Defcon: single location, labor of love (staffed by volunteers), uncompensated speakers. Black Hat: 4 locations?, 4-figure attendance fee, significant speaker compensation, significant full-time paid staff. It took several years of Defcon before Jeff could start Black Hat and go full time to build it.
  - mirkules 15y ago
    Exactly. It's actually great that DevDays was able to charge only $99 AND compensate speakers and workers+! It actually means they one-upped Defcon in that regard. BlackHat-caliber conferences, as you imply, will come over time as Defcon-caliber conferences explode in popularity. Again, I know next to nothing about DevDays, and I could be totally off the mark. But it seems to me, like others pointed out, Joel tried to do too much too quickly. Jeff would have had a tough time getting BH off the ground after just two years of DC. +My assumption here is that by stating Defcon was NOT able to do these things, DevDays was. Sorry if I misunderstood that.
    - saurik 15y ago
      To be fair, venues for conferences don't really have obvious economies of scale: not only do larger conferences often cost more per person, but the quality of the venue and the "rowdiness" (for lack of a better word; arguably the "liability" ;P) of the crowd drastically changes things. For example, if I wanted to a one-day event with a bunch of reasonably happy low-key developers, it is quite easy. Starting on the small end, with something like 5 people, I can do it in my apartment (and people often do this, for small "meetups"), and if we went up to 10 people, everyone could come to my office. Even if I wanted something just a touch larger, the venue costs are still going to stay near zero: if I wanted 20 people, I could borrow someone's conference room, and if I needed to go up to 50 people I know someone nearby who would probably loan me their auditorium/theater setup. With 1-300 people (most conferences), there are lots of choices, from hotels to "community centers": often these are really cheap ways of getting a bunch of people to be able to congregate. If you have a tech conference, you might even be able to get really good rates on something like the eBay "Town Hall". However, DEF CON is simply /not like this/. DEF CON is a four-day conference set at a fancy hotel in Vegas. This year, the estimated attendance was 10,000 people; and these are not just your "quiet developer type": these people (while largely not gambling, which is important), are drinking constantly and hacking stuff. Yes: /hacking stuff/; like the elevators, which were half offline for a day because someone was trying to mess with them (I'm certain their other guests were not happy about this); or the lighting/sound system, which someone managed to find out had a default password, so someone central control and would cut the speaker's mic at just the right moments to drive them most crazy. I kid you not: the point-of-sale terminals at the hotel were offline for a while one day because someone took them offline; there were rumors at the conference that someone had setup a "rogue 3G cell" (to sniff unencrypted connections; apparently people used to do similar things often at previous events), and everyone who attends the conference simply "knows" that you bring enough cash to never have to use the ATMs at the hotel: they are probably skimming cards. And yet, this event is still managed to be run for only $150/person. Insane, huh? ;P Frankly, I have a ton of respect for how DEF CON is able to scale with this kind of insanity, and not run anything but a horrible loss (and for all I know, they do).
kevinherron 15y ago
Price killed it for me too. I felt like it was a no-brainer to go to the 1-day $99 DevDays in SF. When I saw the price and duration of this year's event I didn't event want to ask.
SteveJS 15y ago
Oddly enough there is another way to go. Cheap and a different city. The Lindy Hop community set up a web site to have exchanges back before 2000. http://lindyexchange.com/ http://lindyexchange.com/ It caught on and has been going ever since. Every weekend of every month there is a city throwing an exchange. You can go and stay on the cheap as people volunteer to host, and there is always incredible dancing at exchanges. It's closer to vacation/meetup. Of course ... Swing dancing is inherently a party.
EugeneG 15y ago
Could this be the consequence of fewer updates to Joel on Software? Less pull with the community?
flocial 15y ago
If it's community interaction you seek it's hard to beat GitHub drink ups on this one. Drink beers with founders anywhere they go in the world.
- theshadow 15y ago
  What has this got to with the concept of DevDays other than blatant fanboyism and a plug for github?
nopassrecover 15y ago
Tangential, but a good point was made that some people had booked flights and accommodation already. I wonder if they are still deductible if the event is cancelled?
ZipCordManiac 15y ago
I don't go to a conference for food, AV, coffee or wifi. I go for the presentations. A jump from 99 to 499 seems excessive...
davweb 15y ago
The key difference does seem to be that the jump from $99 to $499 turns DevDays from a conference that you can pay for yourself into one that most people are going to have their employers to pay for. $499 for a two day conference is pretty cheap but what makes DevDays a hard sell to most managers is that the point of it is that it introduces you to technologies that you're not going be using day to day in your job.
ig1 15y ago
BarCamp style conferences have proved it is possible, even in London which is the one of the most expensive city in the world.
rsobers 15y ago
I don't think the multi-city approach is necessary. It seems to be more of a headache than anything else. Stack Overflow has a big enough following that they could hold a 2 day conference in SF, LA, Boston, or Seattle and it would likely sell out. It works for RailsConf, PyCon, CodeConf, LessConf, etc., etc.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
cookiecaper 15y ago
Interesting. I wonder why they didn't just choose to promote the events more aggressively, etc. -- surely Spolsky could have gotten more registrations if he had tried. I think there is a market for a $499 conference, but perhaps it needs to have a better reputation among management first.
kellysutton 15y ago
I went to DevDays in LA in '09 (or '10?). Bummer it's not happening this year.
funkah 15y ago
I enjoyed the original $99 one-day conference, I thought it was a great idea. Really didn't care about the crappy wifi, food, or coffee.
- scdc 15y ago
  I agree. Actually, I was at the $99 Washington, DC conference and remember the food, wifi and coffee being fine.
TrevorBurnham 15y ago
This is a particularly big disappointment for me: Not only was I scheduled to speak at the London event, but there were to be talks on CoffeeScript in all four locations. While CoffeeScript talks have become de rigeur at Ruby/Rails events, Dev Days presented an opportunity to bring the language to a wider developer community. Plus, the talks were going to deal with more advanced topics than the usual "Here's why you should learn CoffeeScript." My talk was cheekily entitled "CoffeeScript: The Only Language You'll Ever Need"; I was planning to talk about tricks and tools for using CoffeeScript in all walks of life. Of course, my sympathies go out to the Dev Days planners; this must have been a very hard decision for them, and an understandable one. Consider me RSVP'd for Dev Days 2012.

165 points by nsoonhui 15y ago

Nice to see Mr Spolsky taking it on the chin and not making excuses. I would be interested in seeing an online version of any of the presentations. Pretty please ?

mathattack 15y ago
Agree on taking responsibility. There are a lot of excuses he could have made: economy, bad PR firm, etc. By taking blame he can now move on to fix things.
- wisty 15y ago
  Also note, this is a perfect response in a PR crisis - taking responsibility (if not legal responsibility), and not behaving like it's everyone else's fault but your own.
- pbiggar 15y ago
  I confess I don't understand this mentality. Why do you personally care that Joel took responsibility?
  - mathattack 15y ago
    If I buy something, and the vendor screws up, if they give me a bunch of excuses, I am more likely to think they'll screw up again. If the vendor takes personal responsibility, there is less chance that they'll make the same mistake again.
    - pbiggar 15y ago
      Ah, I didn't get that you had bought a ticket.
      - mathattack 15y ago
        In full disclosure I didn't. I am just throwing out opinions from the cheap seats. :-)
alphabeat 15y ago
I'm confused. Didn't he put the blame on poor attendance?
- zachallaun 15y ago
  I'm confused. Did you read just the first sentence? The second: It’s my fault, actually. Followed by an entire post re: errors made in planning DevDays '11.
garydevenay 15y ago
I agree. Would have loved to have went to the '09 conference though.
HeyLaughingBoy 15y ago
@spolsky: I guess you've really taken the locksmith lesson to heart then :-)

rodh257 15y ago

I'd love to see an online conference like http://www.mvcconf.com/ http://www.mvcconf.com/ with the speakers who were signed up giving their prepared talks

damncabbage 15y ago

It's sad, but the price really did kill it for me. I've only ever been to a conference on my employer's dime once. $500 is a big gamble for me. (I understand that companies sending devs to conferences seems to be the Done Thing in the States, but I haven't seen it happen too often in Sydney here.)

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]

zdw 15y ago

I love short, vigorous conferences. You get great ideas, and go home feeling energized and ready to try a bunch of new stuff you just learned. Going to longer conferences (like WWDC, etc.) ends up causing brain fatigue after 3rd day of 5 - it's like the Gary Larson "Can I be excused? My brain is full" Far Side comic. Also, the "hallway track" is what I get the most out of - conferences that optimize for that by offering meals and communal events on-site maximize this.

teej 15y ago

Sounds like a classic case of premature scaling. http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of-startup-death-premature-scaling/ http://www.forbes.com/sites/nathanfurr/2011/09/02/1-cause-of...

archangel_one 15y ago

I would have much preferred a $99 conference; I saw the announcement of this year's one and was seriously thinking of attending since I was likely to be geographically nearby this time, but $499 was really a bit much for me. I can drop $99 for a one-off day out, but $499 really seems like you need a company paying your way to it for it to be interesting. I guess this is a big difference between the nature of StackOverflow versus an Oracle Users Conference or similar. Sounds like one major problem is that they really need Joel at the conferences for a bit of "star power", but he obviously doesn't want to spend half his year flying around to SO conferences. Not easily solved, I guess, but I hope they come up with something.

gecko 15y ago
If it were me, needing to be at every location would have been a major factor contributing to this change. Part of Joel's shtick for DevDays was that he showed how proper project management and source control (via FogBugz and Kiln) could really help a small team. Kiln was brand-new at the time, and was a big part of the demo, so I thankfully had an excuse to do the European DevDays stops to answer questions and do demos. And it...well, it starts awesome, if you do it right: you get to see a bunch of stuff you've never seen before, you get to fly first-class if you're lucky, and you meet a bunch of brilliant people. And I think Joel really likes speaking; if you feel comfortable talking in front of a crowd, it's awesome to see all those people wanting to hear what you have to say. So in that sense, doing a pile of small DevDays is absolutely wonderful, in my opinion. But then there's dealing with the fact that almost no venue was properly set up properly. That supplies we badly needed didn't ever quite manage to get where they needed to be in a timely manner (or, in the case of Europe, clear customs at all). That a major prop we had was going to have to be driven around London in a truck by yours truly. That we had to have SSDs FedEx'd at tremendous cost because the laptops couldn't comfortably run VMware properly, and that sometimes, it didn't really matter anyway, because something would go wrong with the projector, and you'd end up being forced to use large televisions instead. Or a speaker would cancel and be replaced at the last second by someone else, or the WiFi would just not be there even though it was absolutely required for someone's demo, or half a dozen other things. And that's just the stuff that goes wrong at the time; you're leaving out all the stuff that had to be planned beforehand. This wore on me, and I only had just a few stops. And Joel (and I) did it two years in a row: DevDays first, and the Fog Creek World Tour second. I have to imagine it wore on him, and I think that might go a long way toward explaining why he tried to consolidate the conferences. But Joel does love travel, and I think DevDays were absolutely wonderful conferences, so that may have absolutely nothing to do with it. I think it may just be as simple as what he wrote in the post: that they tried to make it bigger and more conference-like...which in turn, made it Not Really DevDays, at which point it was competing with things like OSCON and Open Source Bridge. That's a tougher market.

AgentConundrum 15y ago

DevDays 2.0 really seemed to be out of touch with the original DevDays concept. As Joel says in the post, $99 was a good amount for someone to be able to just take a day off work and pay for the conference themselves. Had I not lost my job in mid-2009, I was seriously considering attending the one in Toronto. I could have planned a trip home at the same time, and just stopped over in Toronto rather than immediately grabbing a second - considerably smaller - plane the rest of the way. Even had there been a DevDays Toronto again this time, it would have been out of my price range to attend, and it would have meant finding accommodations for a night and all that goes with that. I couldn't have justified it to myself at all. Good on Joel, though, for straight-up admitting to the problems with the new conferences, rather than manufacturing excuses.

logjam 15y ago

I must be out of touch. A price increase of $99 to $499 is not a "modest increase". Come on.

damncabbage 15y ago
I think he was being facetious.
- georgemcbay 15y ago
  I hope he was, but I'm not certain he was. In any case, I can assure everyone out there who doesn't vacation in the Hamptons that a jump from $99 to $499 is an absolutely huge difference, both practically and psychologically. I'm not sure how he couldn't have predicted this outcome.
- logjam 15y ago
  No, he wasn't. And as numerous people above pointed out, the price killed the deal.
  - damncabbage 15y ago
    And as numerous people above pointed out, ... Including me ( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968214 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2968214 ). I was referring to him calling the price hike a "modest" increase. I read it as him being intentionally inappropriately flippant about the thing that killed the conference (in a mildly humourous and self-effacing manor).

aherlambang 15y ago

Someone should probably do a startup that solves the problem of "overpriced" conferences. This has always been a problem for me when wanting to attend a conferences, first comes the plane ticket, then hotel, and then the conference ticket itself (which sometimes is ridiculously high).

SoftwareMaven 15y ago
The problem of "overpriced" conferences is that conferences are really expensive to put on. Everything from from the location to the food costs a lot, and every place has it's particular rules about what you are allowed to bring in versus what they force you to use. And then you have to pay speakers... We are just putting the finishing touches on ProductCamp Utah, and with no profit and no paid speakers, it is still extremely expensive.
- eschaton 15y ago
  There's a large number of experienced conference runners and planners who will disagree, and collectively have been running inexpensive but good conferences for DECADES. They're called "SMOFs." They run science fiction conventions. (Not "Star Trek" conventions but "science fiction" conventions - books.) And the conventions are not for profit membership organizations typically with hundreds or thousands of members attending over a weekend at a cost of a few tens of dollars each. The SMOFs are generally willing to help others run conferences by giving them advice, doing (paid) consulting work, or even fully (paid) managing conferences. A great example is Expotech, who ran MacHack.
  - akuchling 15y ago
    I was co-chair of Python 2006 & 2007, and in preparation I went to SMOFcon. SF con issues have some relevance to tech cons, but only partially so: * SF cons don't usually provide food for all attendees, which is the big cost driver for tech cons. For PyCon 2011, catering was 54% of the budget. * Tech cons mostly don't have to worry about people in costumes, keeping under-18s out of certain events, or as much rowdy late-night behaviour (e.g. room parties). * Tech cons really, really have to worry about the WiFi network. Recording every presentation may also impose more A/V requirements. Going to SMOFcon was somewhat useful to me, but the differences are significant.

mirkules 15y ago

I have never heard of this event until now. I would love to attend something like this. How/where was this event marketed? Also, $99 sounds like a great price entry point. Defcon started out on the cheap, and a few years later spawned BlackHat. Sounds like a good model to follow.

tptacek 15y ago
Defcon: single location, labor of love (staffed by volunteers), uncompensated speakers. Black Hat: 4 locations?, 4-figure attendance fee, significant speaker compensation, significant full-time paid staff. It took several years of Defcon before Jeff could start Black Hat and go full time to build it.
- mirkules 15y ago
  Exactly. It's actually great that DevDays was able to charge only $99 AND compensate speakers and workers+! It actually means they one-upped Defcon in that regard. BlackHat-caliber conferences, as you imply, will come over time as Defcon-caliber conferences explode in popularity. Again, I know next to nothing about DevDays, and I could be totally off the mark. But it seems to me, like others pointed out, Joel tried to do too much too quickly. Jeff would have had a tough time getting BH off the ground after just two years of DC. +My assumption here is that by stating Defcon was NOT able to do these things, DevDays was. Sorry if I misunderstood that.
  - saurik 15y ago
    To be fair, venues for conferences don't really have obvious economies of scale: not only do larger conferences often cost more per person, but the quality of the venue and the "rowdiness" (for lack of a better word; arguably the "liability" ;P) of the crowd drastically changes things. For example, if I wanted to a one-day event with a bunch of reasonably happy low-key developers, it is quite easy. Starting on the small end, with something like 5 people, I can do it in my apartment (and people often do this, for small "meetups"), and if we went up to 10 people, everyone could come to my office. Even if I wanted something just a touch larger, the venue costs are still going to stay near zero: if I wanted 20 people, I could borrow someone's conference room, and if I needed to go up to 50 people I know someone nearby who would probably loan me their auditorium/theater setup. With 1-300 people (most conferences), there are lots of choices, from hotels to "community centers": often these are really cheap ways of getting a bunch of people to be able to congregate. If you have a tech conference, you might even be able to get really good rates on something like the eBay "Town Hall". However, DEF CON is simply /not like this/. DEF CON is a four-day conference set at a fancy hotel in Vegas. This year, the estimated attendance was 10,000 people; and these are not just your "quiet developer type": these people (while largely not gambling, which is important), are drinking constantly and hacking stuff. Yes: /hacking stuff/; like the elevators, which were half offline for a day because someone was trying to mess with them (I'm certain their other guests were not happy about this); or the lighting/sound system, which someone managed to find out had a default password, so someone central control and would cut the speaker's mic at just the right moments to drive them most crazy. I kid you not: the point-of-sale terminals at the hotel were offline for a while one day because someone took them offline; there were rumors at the conference that someone had setup a "rogue 3G cell" (to sniff unencrypted connections; apparently people used to do similar things often at previous events), and everyone who attends the conference simply "knows" that you bring enough cash to never have to use the ATMs at the hotel: they are probably skimming cards. And yet, this event is still managed to be run for only $150/person. Insane, huh? ;P Frankly, I have a ton of respect for how DEF CON is able to scale with this kind of insanity, and not run anything but a horrible loss (and for all I know, they do).

kevinherron 15y ago

Price killed it for me too. I felt like it was a no-brainer to go to the 1-day $99 DevDays in SF. When I saw the price and duration of this year's event I didn't event want to ask.

SteveJS 15y ago

Oddly enough there is another way to go. Cheap and a different city. The Lindy Hop community set up a web site to have exchanges back before 2000. http://lindyexchange.com/ http://lindyexchange.com/ It caught on and has been going ever since. Every weekend of every month there is a city throwing an exchange. You can go and stay on the cheap as people volunteer to host, and there is always incredible dancing at exchanges. It's closer to vacation/meetup. Of course ... Swing dancing is inherently a party.

EugeneG 15y ago

Could this be the consequence of fewer updates to Joel on Software? Less pull with the community?

flocial 15y ago

If it's community interaction you seek it's hard to beat GitHub drink ups on this one. Drink beers with founders anywhere they go in the world.

theshadow 15y ago
What has this got to with the concept of DevDays other than blatant fanboyism and a plug for github?

nopassrecover 15y ago

Tangential, but a good point was made that some people had booked flights and accommodation already. I wonder if they are still deductible if the event is cancelled?

ZipCordManiac 15y ago

I don't go to a conference for food, AV, coffee or wifi. I go for the presentations. A jump from 99 to 499 seems excessive...

davweb 15y ago

The key difference does seem to be that the jump from $99 to $499 turns DevDays from a conference that you can pay for yourself into one that most people are going to have their employers to pay for. $499 for a two day conference is pretty cheap but what makes DevDays a hard sell to most managers is that the point of it is that it introduces you to technologies that you're not going be using day to day in your job.

ig1 15y ago

BarCamp style conferences have proved it is possible, even in London which is the one of the most expensive city in the world.

rsobers 15y ago

I don't think the multi-city approach is necessary. It seems to be more of a headache than anything else. Stack Overflow has a big enough following that they could hold a 2 day conference in SF, LA, Boston, or Seattle and it would likely sell out. It works for RailsConf, PyCon, CodeConf, LessConf, etc., etc.

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cookiecaper 15y ago

Interesting. I wonder why they didn't just choose to promote the events more aggressively, etc. -- surely Spolsky could have gotten more registrations if he had tried. I think there is a market for a $499 conference, but perhaps it needs to have a better reputation among management first.

kellysutton 15y ago

I went to DevDays in LA in '09 (or '10?). Bummer it's not happening this year.

funkah 15y ago

I enjoyed the original $99 one-day conference, I thought it was a great idea. Really didn't care about the crappy wifi, food, or coffee.

scdc 15y ago
I agree. Actually, I was at the $99 Washington, DC conference and remember the food, wifi and coffee being fine.

TrevorBurnham 15y ago

This is a particularly big disappointment for me: Not only was I scheduled to speak at the London event, but there were to be talks on CoffeeScript in all four locations. While CoffeeScript talks have become de rigeur at Ruby/Rails events, Dev Days presented an opportunity to bring the language to a wider developer community. Plus, the talks were going to deal with more advanced topics than the usual "Here's why you should learn CoffeeScript." My talk was cheekily entitled "CoffeeScript: The Only Language You'll Ever Need"; I was planning to talk about tricks and tools for using CoffeeScript in all walks of life. Of course, my sympathies go out to the Dev Days planners; this must have been a very hard decision for them, and an understandable one. Consider me RSVP'd for Dev Days 2012.