You might have already read the great review of WebSummit 2015 by Gosia (aka “The Cheerful Designer”) and thinking about going next year? Well, maybe is time for an opinion from me – “The Unhappy Developer”.
TL;DR Don’t go.
I knew WebSummit with 42k (!) attendees, gazillion startups and bazillion things might not be the best place for introverts or socially awkward individuals like myself. And that the event is not meant for programmers, but rather marketing people, entreprenours and startupers. Yes, I don’t even know how to spell “entrepreneurs”, but still decided to go when my great friends from Amazemeet invited me to join them. It sounded like one-of-a-kind experience. Plus, I wanted to see the Toys.
source: http://www.v3.co.uk/v3-uk/news/2434300/web-summit-top-10-insights-from-the-dublin-tech-show.
Well, it quickly turned out the WebSummit crowd wasn’t only introverts’ problem. I’m sure 99.9% of attendees felt overwhelmed at some point (and the reminding 0.1% probably just skipped the event and went straight to the pubs). Lots of helpful volunteers, team members and even law enforcement was doing their absolute best to make the whole thing work as smoothly as possible. But with 9 main stages, 10 minutes walk between 2 main buildings, 15 minutes walk to FoodSummit, no breaks between 15-20 minutes talks, queues, plenty other attractions and little space left for walking – it was just not possible.
But I don’t give up easily. I decided to come up with (survival) strategies how to best spend my time and enjoy the experience as much as possible. Since there were 21 different “summits” happening during the whole 3-days event, it was a lot to choose from.
1. Out of comfort zone: FashionSummit
My first idea was to go listen about something I have no clue about and fashion was an obvious choice for me. I was hoping to see other points of views and listen to new stories. But after waiting for 35 minutes (and hardly moving) in the best-dressed queue ever I decided to crawl back to my little world (CodeSummit). Still, I’m planning to use this idea during next conference. And maybe wear better shoes.
2. Big names: CentreStage
The second idea came from the obvious fact that big conferences have some big speakers from big companies. So, like many others, I decided to watch talks on CentreStage, where most famous speakers were invited. Sure, some talks (here and everywhere else) sounded just like shameless self-promotion, but generally the products & companies were interesting or speakers were entertaining enough to keep me listening and enjoying it. And some were really good – just like Gosia, I absolutely loved “Creativity” by Pixar’s Ed Catmull, Mike Schroepfer talking about Facebook’s bold plans to bring the Internet to remote communities, and many others. I also saw on CentreStage my least favourite presentation ever – “The CyberPsychology of CyberCrime”, which turned out to be ……. a cringe-worthy promo for “CSI: Cyber” tv show, with (surprise!) overuse of word “cyber”, no real information and mandatory Freudian-penetration-penis joke that all the 9-year-olds in the audience found hilarious.
3. The comfort zone: CodeSummit
CodeSummit might sound like a perfect safe haven for a developer like me, but I was afraid talks woul be too general or too basic for a rather experienced programmer. My plan was to go there only to listen about security, but I ended up attending a lot of presentations when FashionSummit idea didn’t work out. And yes, talks were a little bit too general, with hardly any code, but really passionate speakers made it worth the time (Jeff Pulver “Remember to breath”, Bryan Liles “Application ops ladder”, Gautam Rege “Gopher it”). And then the talks about security started and I was absolutely blown away by Nico Sell, Mikko Hypponen, Eugeny Chereshnev – just to name a few.
source: https://www.jibo.com/
4. The Heaven: MachineSummit
My ultimate reason to go to The Big Conferences. The chance to see and maybe even play with Pepper the humanoid robot, Jibo the social robot, mini-drones, the latest wearables, try Audi Oculus Rift Experience, all the “fit-bits for cats” and so on. Discussions about “Not so uncanny valley” or “Robot ethics” (which turned out to be about having sex with robots), Cynthia Breazeal’s talk about “Rise of the social robots” and Keynote from Pebble were my absolute favorites. Sure, I was tempted to start counting speakers telling the audience that their company is doing almost as exciting things as Tesla :), but yeah – that was true most of the time.
Also, WiFi and coffee were good. And Dublin has the best pubs and live music. But unless you enjoy shopping on Black Friday, barging your way through the crowd or love networking so much even overdosing it still sounds like real fun ….
Don’t go.