Chris Castle is a developer advocate at Heroku and Salesforce. He is joined by Carter Rabasa, the lead organizer of CascadiaJS, as well as Julián Duque, a developer advocate here at Salesforce/Heroku who organizes NodeConf and JSConf in Colombia. Carter shares his first experiences at a tech conference, finding it to be surprisingly intimate and a great community of well-intentioned web developers that wanted to learn. He was inspired to start CascadiaJS, a JavaScript conference situated in the Pacific Northwest. Over time, he realized that it's the people and the networking opportunities that really makes CascadiaJS special.
When COVID-19 made it clear that in-person events would not happen for 2020, he and his team struggled to figure out how to put on an event that their community would love. It required them to imagine a future where software to support their vision didn't exist yet. They became certain that the event would need to learn how to be virtual for a long time. They accepted this challenge, and set to work building a conference model that they felt was interactive and immersive. There was just a tremendous excitement and enthusiasm to see if they could do something that hadn't been done yet.
Of course, they stumbled in several ways; there were issues sending swag to customers, for example. Still, there are many reasons to keep the virtual conference format. For one, it's more accomodating for people with physical accessibility issues as well as attendees all over the world. There's more flexibility in the timing of events, where speakers can just play their sessions one after another; attendees can hop between different workshops and talks at the click of a mouse. Julián agrees that CascadiaJS' hybrid format of a recorded talk followed by a live Q&A was great for engagement, as speakers were chatting with viewers as their session played. Overall, Carter is excited at future conferences having a serious virtual component to them.
Links from this episode118. Why Writing Matters for Engineers
117. Open Source with Jim Jagielski
116. Success From Anywhere
115. Demystifying the User Experience with Performance Monitoring
114. Beyond Root Cause Analysis in Complex Systems
113. Principles of Pragmatic Engineering
112. Managing Public Key Infrastructure within an Enterprise
111. Gift Cards for Small Businesses
110. Scaling a Bernie Meme
109. Meditation for the Curious Skeptic
108. Building Community with the Wicked CoolKit
I Was There: Stories of Production Incidents II
107. How to Write Seriously Good Software
106. Growing a Self-Funded Company
105. Event Sourcing and CQRS
104. The Evolution of Service Meshes
103. Chaos Engineering
102. Whether or Not to Repeat Yourself: DRY, DAMP, or WET
101. Cloud Native Applications
100. Math for Programmers
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