Journal tags: sotb

I’ve had the opportunity to gather with my peers a few times over the past couple of months.

There was dConstruct, which I hosted. That was just lovely.

Then a few weeks ago, in spite of train strikes and travel snags, I went to Bristol to give a talk at Web Dev Conf, a really nice gathering.

This past weekend I was in London for State Of The Browser, this time as neither host nor speak, but as an attendee. It was really good!

I noticed something rather lovely. There was enough cross-over in the audiences for these events that I got to see some people more than once. That’s something that used to happen all the time but became very rare over the past two years because of The Situation.

None of the organisers of these events were pretending that Covid has gone away. Each event had different processes in place to mitigate risk. I wrote about the steps I took for dConstruct. For some people, those measures might seem to go too far. For other people, they don’t go far enough. This is a challenge that every in-person event is facing and from what I’ve seen, they’re all doing their level best.

None of these events were particularly large. Attendence was maybe somewhere between 100 and 200 people at each one. I know that there’s still a risk in any kind of indoor gathering but these events feel safer than the really big tech gatherings (like the one in Berlin where I got the ’rona—that was literally tens of thousands of people).

Anyway, all three events were thoroughly enjoyable. Partly that’s because the talks were good, but also because the socialising was really, really nice—all the nicer for being in relatively safe environments.

It’s not exactly an earth-shattering observation to point out that the social side of conferences is just as valuable as the content. But now that so many of us are working remotely, I feel like that aspect of in-person events has become even more important.

Or maybe I’m just appreciating that aspect of in-person events after spending such a long time with screen-mediated interactions only.

Conference talks are like buses. They take a long time and you constantly ask yourself why you chose to get on board.

I’ll start again.

Conference talks are like buses. You wait for ages and then three come along at once. Or at least, three conference videos have come along at once:

1. The video of the talk I gave at State Of The Browser called The Web Is Agreement.
2. The video of the talk I gave at New Adventures called Building.
3. The video of the talk I gave at Frontend United called Going Offline.

That last one is quite practical. It’s very much in the style of the book I wrote on service workers. If you’d like to see this talk, you should come to An Event Apart in Chicago in August.

The other two are …less practical. They’re kind of pretentious really. That’s kinda my style.

The Web Is Agreement was a one-off talk for State Of The Browser. I like how it turned out, and I’d love to give it again if there were a suitable event.

I will be giving my New Adventures talk again in Vancouver next month at the Design & Content conference. You should come along—it looks like it’s going to be a great event.

I’ve added these latest three conference talk videos to my collection. I’m using Notist to document past talks. It’s a great service! I became a paying customer just over a year ago and it was money well spent. I really like how I’ve been able to set up a custom domain:

speaking.adactio.com