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**Adam Stacoviak:** Humans are hard. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Because the logistics or the money side - those are struggles, but with proper planning you can mitigate for those problems. The human challenge is always tough, because it's something new every year, and I tend to learn from experience... I can't learn as much from serving other people, so when it com... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you tend to be... Dare I say it, not much grace, even if you mess up, right? |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's like, "How dare you? You should have thought about this beforehand." A lot of onus is put on conference organizers to really do well and do it right the first time. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that's something I've tried to -- over the years I've noticed that 1) people don't wanna know how the sausage is made, but when it comes to community conferences especially, when people aren't getting paid to do it and they are sacrificing a lot of their spare time... But it's just like open sour... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** A thankless job... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Right, absolutely. The volunteer work is taken for granted, and people really don't get to see this sacrifice that's made in order to make those things happen, and it's such a temporary thing... Because it's only a couple of days in a year. Before I was helping with open source, it helped me empathize. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So when was that for you, before you were helping with open source? |
**Tracy Hinds:** \[03:56\] My event organizing has always been attached to something like Node or JavaScript, but I haven't been -- I mean, outside of contributing to the event open source or tooling for that, it wasn't probably until last year... I was making open source tooling for conferences, but that's what my dri... |
Otherwise, I wasn't working on things like Node until this year as an open source contributor, which is really whacky. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What kind of open source tooling goes around at a conference? |
**Tracy Hinds:** Everything from making the websites better, and making them apps instead of just sites, so that we can have a call for talks, or a review system... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** You'd think that problem would be solved much better by now... Like, how many years later have we-- |
**Tracy Hinds:** Well, it's been addressed three times over, but it's in different languages, or it gets worked on and then isn't maintained, or it doesn't fit the kind of conference that we're running, and it's enough of a not-fit that forking doesn't work. Or things like we were bananas enough early on to do somethin... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** ...so you could make a judgment call based on the person's name or gender, or color race... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, so then you're pulling it back in, so you're creating tools that's like -- you know, trying to deal with the GitHub API, and also the Google API. I know at least in the JavaScript community with conference organizers, a lot of people were doing that sort of thing, because one group does it and th... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So are any of these tools available, open, in the process? What's the state of these things? |
**Tracy Hinds:** That one is under I believe the EmpireJS.org. I help run EmpireJS as well as advise for Empire Node, which I helped found. Those are two conferences in New York. I think we also created a document with my co-organizer for Cascadia... We have a How To Conf; we actually have documentation on how to run a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So the How To Conf repo is everything you know about how to put on CascadiaJS or a conference like it? |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's interesting. I'm looking through the contents... Organizing a team, picking a date, sponsorship, CFPs, website... |
**Tracy Hinds:** And it does really need to be updated, because I don't think I've even worked on that this year. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is this readme, is it documentation, or is it actual working code that you can launch your own site from, and stuff like that? |
**Tracy Hinds:** That's a readme. We have many of the years of the websites that we ran for the conference, because they tend to be one-offs. Cascadia's is documented in a way that you should just be able to clone it and run it. The How To Conf repo is not a whole package, so that's definitely the readme documentation ... |
\[07:59\] It was sort of like, "Well, we can spend that time to create apps that would help us organize this in a better way, but there's either pay tools that do that, so we don't wanna spend too much time because people are already using it", or we're just fine with using spreadsheets. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you feel about the site for this conference here? I know I talked to Mikeal earlier, maybe this is a touchy subject, but... |
**Tracy Hinds:** It's not a touchy subject... It doesn't engage people; it's really hard to dig in and find things, and I think the ability to be able to -- I mean, Mikeal and I are both developers and it's tough when we want to just be able to step in and fix something really quick, because we're used to doing that, a... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. How many times today have you been asked what's the Wi-Fi password? |
**Tracy Hinds:** None, I was surprised. I think people are starting to get used to this, and I think this is the best thing ever. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I love the lanyard, by the way... It's great, because I hate when they flip. |
**Tracy Hinds:** I know. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And you're like, "What's your name?" and it's like, it's the back of the lanyard, it's not the front. Great job, I like that blend of lanyard best with a tube, so it doesn't spin. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, that's all our events team. Lara and Cassandra, they think of everything. That's all on them. I always forget to do these, and I end up doing the center ones, because they're everywhere. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Or if you don't have that, the way they attach well, they can make a lot of noise, so all you hear in the background of the conference room is the clinking sound of the metal clinking together. Because if it moves - which it does, because people are gonna move and shuffle, and you can't make everybo... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Ours are terrible and beautiful... For Cascadia, the last three years we've done wooden engraved badges, which is great, except they're terribly loud and very heavy. And then you're also not gonna do double-sided, because it's really expensive; we're paying an artist to carve that stuff out, so... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow. A lot of attention, though. I mean, it's about an experience. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Well, my dream is that -- New Relic has a conference that they've been doing for a number of years, and... I'm so embarrassed I can't remember it right now; one year they did a really incredible -- I mean, the only time I've heard of anything like this is when DefCon did it... And they did, they absolu... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Mikeal and I talked about this... It was FutureStack. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah, FutureStack, which I've heard is a great conference, which is always something interesting too when you're talking about a company or a suite of products... Running a conference is always -- it's peculiar to me, because the way I run conferences, I see it as very neutral and objective. That's not... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** They've always been developer-first, Twilio... They've got a good rapport relationship with the community. I think once you begin to toe the line of exploitation, to a degree, or making it about yourself and not about the community, you get in the danger zone. |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. Well, I'd imagine when you're managing sponsor expectations, you have to be very careful when you're walking that line, ensuring that they can trust you, that they get equal footing alongside you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. What's the challenge there with sponsors? Are you involved in that with this conference much, or other conferences? |
**Tracy Hinds:** \[11:44\] This conference I wasn't, no. Todd Benzies and \[unintelligible 00:11:50.00\] lead the charge on that for us, and thank goodness, because we've all got a lot of ownership in these conferences, but for me for this it's content, recruiting speakers, making sure that we've got a good variety of ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right, or even English-centric, or language barrier... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** I talked to Shiya from Autodesk, and we talked a lot about just the language barrier there in China. They work in Chinese, obviously, versus Japan, where they primarily work in English; they speak Japanese at work, but the can work in English. And you never really realize until you flip the coin how... |
**Tracy Hinds:** Oh, sure. When I was talking with my friend Juan Pablo - he is from Columbia, and he has done incredible work with Columbia dev, which is a group that is really strengthening the tech community in Columbia and around it because of what they're doing... So there's other countries that are sort of networ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Tracy Hinds:** At the time I think it was zero... And this wasn't ten years ago. This was two years ago. |
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