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.
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.
Comments
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.
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.