Notes From 3 Conferences

I started this month by speaking or hosting at 4 events in 2 countries over 5 days (DrupalCon Amsterdam, DomCode, ZgPHP, WebCamp). While hectic, it was a great way to see a cross section of the community back-to-back. So, I’d like to talk about the events in turn but also some meta-topics about conferences themselves.

DrupalCon

This was one of the biggest conferences I’ve been to, and definitely the slickest, most well produced. Huge stages, a giant conference center, a “pre-note” with zebra pattern suits and super heroes. The conference had a good sense of humor about itself but the ambition was evident. Drupal is Big(tm) and they know it.

From a tech and community perspective, it’s an interesting position. On the one hand, Drupal began life as a open-source project but now has a massive commercial side (check out the sponsors hall). The keynote discussed Drupal as becoming a Public Good, citing Paul Samuelson’s work and outlining a 3 step lifecycle in this process: Volunteers → Business → Government. The fact the keynote began with a sponsored doppelganger act was a tacit admission of where Drupal currently stands in this process.

This isn’t necessarily bad. I have little knowledge of Drupal but my impression is the commercial interest helps drive an increasing “professionalization” of the developers and tooling. Rolling out best practices and applying general engineering principles to Drupal is a great step forward. Make no mistake, they are tackling genuinely hard problems.

Perhaps for this reason, Drupal is also trying to reconnect to the PHP community at large. This is also a hugely positive (and arguably necessary) move to bring in some of those professional dev practices. At the same time, the feedback I received for my talk on the general PHP track was different enough from other conferences to remind that it is a separate audience, at least for now.

Still, the question on everyone’s mind was “How do we keep hobbyist developers?” I interpreted this as: “Has the re-engineering of Drupal made it so complex that only experienced pro developers can reasonably work with it and was it worth the additional complexity?” To that: I don’t know. I don’t know the code. A well engineered codebase should be less complex but using it may require you to sideload a lot of knowledge (i.e. indirect complexity). That’s possibly a culture or documentation issue, not a technical one.

Some of the articles in the Drupal magazine I found in my swag bag questioned if this was even an issue. Perhaps the natural evolution of Drupal is a focus on high-end, high-traffic CMS sites. Perhaps not.

Either way, it was a great conference. Drupal is juggernaut and here to stay. I don’t know where the road will take them but they’re trying to head in the right direction, even when it’s uphill. Much respect.

ZgPHP

Two days later, and I was presenting at ZgPHP in Zagreb, Croatia (my first trip to the region). The difference was intense.

ZgPHP is a local user group in Zagreb and this was their second annual conference but their first in English. As such, it’s a much smaller event: Total attendees were around 80, though the number waxed and waned throughout the day.

One of the great things about this conference though is the price: it’s completely free to attend. Like DrupalCon, ZgPHP is also worried about the hobbyists and the lone cowboy coders and the tiny dev shops. So, their response is to lower the barrier to obtaining pro-level knowledge, at least as much as possible and free tickets are a great step to do that in a country where the unemployment rate is a crushing 20%. They can’t reach everyone with this tactic but it’s certainly not for lack of trying.

To be fair, that comes with certain tradeoffs: The venue was donated by the local Chamber of Commerce. There was no catering staff and lunch was local pastries with 2 liter bottles of Coke. My badge was an oversized sticker with my name and twitter handle written on it in marker. (When I returned to the hotel, I peeled the sticker off carefully and cut up toilet paper with shaving scissors then stuck to the back so I could bring it home for my badge collection).

So, yes, it’s a small conference but by design. It was well run, well organized and a really nice community.

Croatia isn’t a huge country (4.23 million people, slightly less than Kentucky). Nonetheless, there’s multiple user groups and even another annual conference. That’s some great hustle. By and large, the conversations I had were the same as anywhere else: HHVM and REST APIs, unit testing and decoupling. I was the only speaker not from the region, which made me nervous but folks laughed at my jokes and left nice joind.in reviews. It was a good crowd and I had fun.

WebCamp

Two days later and I was at another conference in Zagreb: WebCamp. Rather than focus on any specific language or tool, WebCamp is about, well, the web.

It’s also massive. And free. Like ZgPHP, WebCamp is totally free to attend. All you had to do is register for one of the 1100+ free tickets on their website, which lasted less than a day. Of course, as with any free ticket, there were a lot of no-shows but around 800 people attended on the first day. True, that’s smaller than DrupalCon but 800 people is significantly larger than almost any PHP conference out there.

Still, a conference of this scale has bills, so attendees could buy a supporter pack (~40 euros?), which came with a t-shirt and some other goodies. Lots of sponsors chipped in and they received perks like evening stands and an hour-long recruitment session on the first day.

WebCamp was a joint effort by several local user groups: PHP, Ruby, Python, JS, you name it. In fact, WebCamp and ZgPHP were part of a whole initiative called “Week of WebCamp” where there were several smaller conferences and workshops throughout the city of Zagreb.

It’s an ambitious undertaking which culminated in WebCamp itself. I’m don’t know if any of the individual groups could’ve pulled this together individually but together, they made it work really well. I saw talks on everything from Elixir to Gearman to data aggregation.

For my part, I was asked to do the opening keynote, which was an enormous honor but the size made it intimidating. Still, the crowd laughed and had fun and even I was reasonably pleased with the result. They also asked me to host one of the tracks which meant a crash course in pronouncing Crotian names (final score: D+).

I’m a huge fan of multi-technology events and also the free-to-attend model but they’re hard to get right. Watching someone pull off a 2-day, dual-track, 800 person conference in those formats plus the additional events throughout the week was amazing. Yes, nothing is perfect but it was absolutely a success.

I’m not an “Everything is awesome”, “Community Works” cheerleader sort of fellow. Still, WebCamp in action was inspiring and leaves me wondering if it’s a taste of things to come: a free-to-attend, multi-community event supported by donations and sponsors.

Conclusion

I had a great time at all of the events and would highly recommend any of them (I skipped over DomCode as I’m one of the founders but would highly recommend it as well)!

Still, I left with a lot of questions. Everywhere I went, people mentioned hobbyist or junior developers. How do we reach them? How do we attract them? What do we teach them? This is especially true in the PHP community where there’s a huge variation in knowledge level.

It also left me wondering about the role of those teaching. Are free-to-attend events more open? Doesn’t that leave us more dependent on our sponsors? Should our conferences be more cost-effective affairs or can we teach more effectively when we go all out? Is commercial backing driving knowledge or impeding it? How can we encourage the right attitude in our partners? Who are we really targeting with technical conferences? Is turning teaching into a commercial interest an acceptable path for an open source community? What are the role of speakers in this?

Each of these events brings a different model to the table. Is there a right one? Well, the fact that all of them are successful in different ways says probably not. I loved the variety of speakers plus the pomp and circumstance of DrupalCon but you probably couldn’t pull that off on a ZgPHP budget. At the same time, I felt like I could take more specific questions and help people more deeply at ZgPHP precisely because it so direct. There are things you can do with one model that you can’t necessarily do with another. I suppose we need different events pushing different models to catch the widest possible subset of the community, though I wish we could do better.

One amazing thing was that all of these conferences were recording their talks to publish them on the web for free. My DrupalCon talk was online less than 2 hours after I gave it, which is bonkers. Perhaps the web-based model is the real future here, though as long as there’s a hallway track and a social to network at, there will be value in attending conferences. Which just leaves one question an event to consider: who are we trying to bring in and how do we get them there?

Many thanks to Igor Wiedler for proofreading an earlier version of this article