What Ingredients Go Into The Perfect Developer Event?

2 responses to “What Ingredients Go Into The Perfect Developer Event?”

1. 

   Dan

   February 16, 2011

   You seem to have left beer off the list… just sayin’.

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2. 

   Dylan Lacey

   February 22, 2011

   God, I don’t want *any* of those options.

   Comedians and models are irrelevant unless they’re technical themselves. Sure, get someone funny to host the event, but make them know *something* about it.

   Award presentations seem like they’d be pretty obscure. What achievements are you going to recognize? Best startup? Best team office? Most use of buzzwords?

   Developer networking is something I’d be interested in, but not as “Networking”, which frankly seems like a great way to make an event feel hollow. I’d rather something like speed-dating for geeks, with emphasis on making friends. Give a pre-defined social framework so that people who aren’t great at introducing themselves have an easy way to do so. Mix things up but make sure that you don’t stick a carnivorous, heavy-metal listening WOW playing graphic designer with a outdoorsy, vegan kernal hacker who hates MMO’s.

   Workshops are always interesting, if they’re sufficently general… “How to use Ruby on Rails to improve your conversion rate” would bore me to tears, “5 ways to use online services to make moving suck less” would be great! (Or ‘Why normal people don’t get your job and how to enlighten them’ or “Why your blog sucks but is still important”).

   Panel discussions seem kinda… I dunno… Boring.

   What about talks from local startup successes to inspire people? Get someone who knows best practices to talk about how they’ve failed sometimes anyway (Failure is more interesting and believable then success).

   And maybe something TOTALLY off the wall… Like a demo of the RepRap or a cup stacking competition.

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