Every few months there is a drama happening in the blogging and social media scene. We seem to need that to keep ourselves occupied. It allows us to get distracted from the feeling that the people who pay us have no idea what we do. And keep praising us for things we are not proud of, cementing our impostor syndrome.

For an upcoming talk, I analysed the recurring themes that we get fired up about. I will post one on each of these over the next few weeks.

• CSS is not real programming and broken
• JavaScript can’t be trusted
• We need granular control over web APIs, not abstractions
• The web is better than any other platform as it is backwards compatible and fault tolerant
• The web is broken and backwards compatibility is holding us back
• Publishing on the web using web standards is easy and amazing
• The web is world-wide and needs to be more inclusive
• Mobile is the present and future

Each of these topics can spark thousands of reactions, dozens of blog posts. Many will get you a speaking slot at an event. They are all true, but they are also all not necessarily yielding the amazing insight we expect them to. I’ll try to explain why they are endless loops and what we could do to get past discussing these over and over again. Maybe it is a good time to concentrate on solving other, new, problems instead. And recognise that a new generation of makers and developers may not be as excited about them as we are.

Yes, these will be my opinions and they may spark some discourse. That’s fine. You can disagree with me, and I promise to keep this to the point and civil. I’ve done this for a very long time, I’ve heard many people talk and discuss these. Hopefully my insights will hit a mark with some of you and make us reconsider rehashing the same old discussions over and over again.

I am currently on the train back to London after attending the first two days of Reasons.to in Brighton, England. I need to go to pick up my mail that accumulated in my London flat before going back to Berlin and Seattle in a day, otherwise there would be no way I’d not want to see this conference through to the end.

I don’t want to go. Reasons.to is an amazing experience. Let me start by listing the reasons why you should be part of it as an attendee or as a presenter. I will write up a more detailed report on why this year was amazing for me personally later.

Why reasons.to is a great experience for attendees:

Reasons.to is a conference about creative makers that use technology as a tool. It is not a conference about hard-core technical topics or limited to creating the next app or web site. It is a celebration of creativity and being human about it. If you enjoy Beyond Tellerand, this is also very much for you. That’s not by accident – the organisers of both shows are long-term friends and help each other finding talent and getting the right people together.

As such, it demands more of both the presenters and the audience. There are no recordings of the talks, and there is no way to look up later what happened. It is all about the here and now and about everyone at the event making it a memorable experience.

Over and over the organisers remind the audience to use the time to mingle and network and not worry about asking the presenters for more details. There is no Q&A and there is ample time in breaks to ask in person instead. Don’t worry – presenters are coached that this is something to expect at this event and they all agreed.

There is no food catering – you’re asked to find people to join and go out for breaks, lunches and dinners instead. This is a great opportunity to organize yourselves and even for shy people to leave with a group and have a good excuse to get a bit out of their shell.

This is a getting to know and learning about each other event. And as such, there is no need to advertise itself as an inclusive safe space for people. It just is. You meet people from all kind of backgrounds, families arrive with children and all the people involved in putting on the show know each other.

There are no blatant sponsored talks or holy wars about “framework vs. library” or “technology x vs. technology y”. There is no grandstanding about “here is what I did and it will revolutionise our little world”. There is no “I know this doesn’t work yet, but it will be what you need to use else you’d be outdated and you do it wrong”. And most importantly there is no “this is my showreel, am I not amazing” presentations that are sadly enough often what “creative” events end up having.

The organisers are doing a thorough job finding presenters that are more than safe bets to sell tickets or cover the newest hotness. Instead they work hard to find people who have done amazing things and aren’t necessarily that known but deserve to be.

If anything, there is a very refreshing feeling of meeting people whose work you may know from advertising, on trains, TV or big billboards. And realizing that these are humans and humble about their outrageous achievements. And ready to share their experiences and techniques creating them – warts and all.

The organisers have a keen eye on spotting talent that is amazing but not quite ready to tell the world about it and then making them feel welcome and excited about sharing their story. All the presenters are incredibly successful in what they do, yet none of them are slick and perfect in telling their story. On the contrary, it is very human to see the excitement and how afraid some of these amazing people are in showing you how they work.

Reasons.to is not an event where you will leave with a lot of new and immediately applicable technical knowledge. You will leave, however, with a feeling that even the most talented people are having the same worries as you. And that there is more to you if you just stop stalling and allow yourself to be more creative. And damn the consequences.

Why reasons.to is a great idea for presenters

As a presenter, I found this conference to be incredibly relaxed. It is an entity, it is a happening that is closed in itself without being elitist.

Not having video recordings and having a very low-traffic social media backchannel might be bad for your outside visibility and makes it harder to show the impact you had to your manager. But it makes for a much less stressful environment to present in. Your job is to inspire and deal with the audience at the event, not to deliver a great, reusable video recording or deal with people on social media judging you without having seen you performing or being aware of the context in which you said something.

You have a chance to be yourself. A chance to not only deliver knowledge but share how you came by it and what you did wrong without having to worry about disappointing an audience eager for hard facts. You can be much more vulnerable and human here than at other – more competitive – events.

You need to be ready to be available though. And to spend some extra time in getting to know the other presenters, share tips and details with the audience and to not be a performer that drops in, does the show and moves on. This event is a great opportunity not only to show what you did and want people to try, but it is also a great event to stay at and take in every other talk. Not to compare, but to just learn about people like you but with vastly different backgrounds and approaches.

There is no place for ego at this event. That’s a great thing as it also means that you don’t need to be the perfect presenter. Instead you’re expected to share your excitement and be ready to show mistakes you made. As you would with a group of friends. This is refreshing and a great opportunity for people who have something to show and share but aren’t quite sure if the stage is theirs to command.

TL;DR: I am going on holiday for a week and don’t take any computer with me. When I’m back I will cut down on my travels, social media and conference participation and focus more on coaching others, writing and developing with a real production focus.

You won’t hear much from me in the next week or so as I am taking a well-deserved vacation. I’m off to take my partner to the Cayman Islands to visit friends who have a house with a spare room as hotels started to feel like work for me. I’m also making the conscious decision to not take any computer with me as I will be tempted to do work whilst I am there. Which would be silly.

Having just been in a lot of meetings with other DevRel people and a great event about it I found a pattern: we all have no idea how to measure our success and feel oddly unsatisfied if not worried about this. And we are all worried about keeping up to do date in a daily changing market.

I’m doing OK on both of these, but I also suffer from the same worries. Furthermore, I am disturbed about the gap between what we talk about at events and workshops and what gets released in the market afterwards.

The huge gap between publication and application

We have all the information what not to do to create engaging, fast and reliable solutions. We have all the information how to even automate some of these to not disrupt fast development processes. And yet I feel a massive lack of longevity or maintainability in all the products I see and use. I even see a really disturbing re-emergence of “this only needs to work on browser $x and platform $y” thinking. As if the last decade hadn’t happened. Business decisions dictate what goes into production, less so what we get excited about.

Even more worrying is security. We use a lot of third party code, give it full access to machines and fail to keep it up-to-date. We also happily use new and untested code in production even when the original developers state categorically that it shouldn’t be used in that manner.

When it comes to following the tech news I see us tumbling in loops. Where in the past there was a monthly cadence of interesting things to come out, more readily available publication channels and a “stream of news” mentality makes it a full-time job just to keep up with what’s happening.

Many thoughtpieces show up in several newsletters and get repurposed even if the original authors admitted in commentary that they were wrong. A lot is about being new and fast, not about being right.

There is also a weird premature productisation happening. When JavaScript, Browsers and the web weren’t as ubiquitous as they are now, we showed and explained coding tricks and workarounds in blog posts. Now we find a solution, wrap it in a package or a library and release it for people to use. This is a natural progression in any software, but I miss the re-use and mulling around of the original thought. And I am also pretty sure that the usage numbers and stars on GitHub are pretty inflated.

My new (old) work modus

Instead of speaking at a high amount of conferences, I will be much pickier with where I go. My time is more limited now, and I want to use my talents to have a more direct impact. This is due to a few reasons:

• I want to be able to measure more directly what I do – it is a good feeling to be told that you were inspiring and great. But it fails to stay a good feeling when you don’t directly see something coming out of it. That’s why instead of going from event to event I will spend more time developing tools and working directly with people who build products.
• I joined a new team that is much more data driven – our job is to ensure people can build great apps and help them by fixing our platform and help them apply best practices instead of just hearing about them. This is exciting – I will be able to see just how applicable what we talk about really is and collect data of its impact. Just like any good trainer should ensure that the course attendees really learned what you talked about this is a full feedback loop for cool technologies like ServiceWorker and Push Nofifications.
• We just hired a truckload of talented people to coach – and I do want to see other people on stage than the usual suspects. It is great to see people grow with help you can give.
• I just had a cancer growth removed from my face – it was benign but it is kind of a wake-up call to take more care about myself and have my body looked after better on an ongoing basis
• I am moving to Berlin to exclusively live there with my partner and our dog – I’ve lived out of suitcases for years now and while this is great it is fun to have a proper home with people you care about to look after. I will very much miss London, but I am done with the politics there and I don’t want to maintain two places any longer.
• I will spend more time coding – I am taking over some of the work on PWAbuilder and other helper tools and try them out directly with partners. Working in the open is great, but there is a huge difference between what Twitter wants and what people really need
• I will write more – both articles and blog posts. I will also have a massive stab at refreshing the Developer Evangelism Handbook
• I will work more with my employer and its partners – there is a huge group of gifted, but very busy developers out there that would love to use more state-of-the-art technology but have no time to try it out or to go to conferences.

What this means for events and meetups

Simple.

• I will attend less – instead I will connect conferences and meetups with other people who are not as in demand but great at what they do. I am also helping and mentoring people inside and outside the company to be invited instead of me. A lot of times a recommendation is all that is needed. And a helping hand in getting over the fear of “not being good enough”.
• I will stay shorter – I want to still give keynotes and will consider more workshops. But I won’t be booking conferences back-to-back and will not take part in a lot of the social activities. Unless my partner is also coming along. Even better when the dog is allowed, too.
• I am offering to help others – to review their work to get picked and help conference organisers to pick new, more diverse, talent.

I have a lot of friends who do events and I will keep supporting those I know have their full heart in them. I will also try to be supportive for others that need a boost for their new event. But I think it is a good time to help others step up. As my colleague Charles Morris just said at DevRelConf, “not all conferences need a Chris Heilmann”. It is easy to get overly excited about the demand you create. But it is as important to not let it take over your life.

Last week I was in Seattle to attend a few meetings and I was lucky to attend DevRelSummit in the Galvanize space. I was invited to cover an “Ask me anything” slot about Developer Outreach in Microsoft and help out Charles Morris of the Edge team who gave a presentation a similar matter.

https://twitter.com/angelmbanks/status/896119273340379136

It feels weird to have a conference that is pretty meta about the subject of Developer relations (and there is even a ConfConf for conference organisers), but I can wholeheartedly recommend DevRelSummit for people who already work in this field and those who want to.

The line-up and presentations were full of people who know their job and shared real information from the trenches instead of advertising products to help you. This is a very common worry when a new field in our job market gains traction. Anyone who runs events or outreach programs drowns in daily offers of “the turn-key solution to devrel success” or similar snake oil.

In short, the presentations were:

• Bear Douglas of Slack (formerly Twitter and Facebook) sharing wins and fails of developer outreach
• Charles Morris of Microsoft showing how he scaled from 3 people on the Edge team to a whole group, aligning engineering and outreach
• Kyle Paul showing how to grow a community in spaces that are not technical cool spots and how to measure DevFest success
• AJ Glasser of Unity explaining how to deal with and harvest feedback you get showing some traps to avoid
• Damon Hernandez of Samsung talking about building community around hackathons
• Linda Xie of Sourcegraph showing the product and growth cycle of a new software product
• Robert Nyman of Google showing how he got into DevRel and what can be done to stay safe and sound on the road
• Angel Banks and Beth Laing sharing the road to and the way to deliver an inclusive conference with their “We Rise” event as the example
• Jessica Tremblay and Sam Richard showing how IBM scaled their developer community

In between the presentations there were breakout discussions, lightning talks and general space and time to network and share information.

As expected, the huge topics of the event were increasing diversity, running events smoothly, scaling developer outreach and measuring devrel success. Also, as expected, there were dozens of ways and ideas how to do these things with consensus and agreeable discourse.

All in all, DevRelSummit was a very well executed event and a superb networking opportunity without any commercial overhead. There was a significant lack of grandstanding and it was exciting to have a clear and open information exchange amongst people who should be in competition but know that when it comes to building communities, this is not helpful. There is a finite amount of people we want to reach doing Developer Relations. There is no point in trying to subdivide this group even further.

Cheers to another successful @DevRelSummit, Sandra & Barry! ?@SandraPersing @bteiger pic.twitter.com/aPVfpvRe9w

— Tia Over (@tiaover) August 12, 2017

I want to thank everyone involved about the flawless execution and the willingness to share. Having a invite-only slack group with pre-set channels for each talk and session was incredibly helpful and means the conversations are going on right now.

DevRelSummit showed that when you get a dedicated group of people together who know their jobs and are willing to share that you can get an event to be highly educational without any of the drama that plights other events. We have a lot of problems to solve and many of them are very human issues. A common consensus of the event was that we have to deal with humans and relate to them. Numbers and products are good and useful, but not burning out or burning bridges even with the best of intentions are even more important.

It is incredible how far we’ve come in the coverage of events. In the past, I recorded my own talks as audio as not many conferences offered video recordings (and wrote about this as a good idea in the developer evangelism handbook). These days I find myself having not having to do this as most conferences and even meetups record talks. Faster upload speeds and simple, free hosting on YouTube and others made that possible.

And yet it is expensive and a lot of work to record and publish videos of your conference. And if you don’t make any money with them it is a bit of advertising for your event with a lot of overhead. That’s why it is a shame to see just how low the viewing numbers of some great conference videos are. When talking to conference organisers, I heard some astonishingly low numbers. The only thing to boost them seems to be to deliver them one after the other with dedicated social media promotion. Which, again, is a lot of extra effort.

In order to see what would make people watch more conference talks, I took a quick Twitter poll:

Poll time: what would make you watch more conference videos?

— Chris Heilmann codepo8@toot.cafe (@codepo8) July 11, 2017

Here are the quick results of 344 votes:

• 29% chose shorter videos without Q&A
• 37% would like transcripts with timestamps
• 22% would like to have videos offline
• 12% wanted captions.

I love watching conference talk videos. I watch them offline, on an iPod in the gym or on planes and trains. Basically when I am not able to do anything else, they are a great way to spend your time and learn something. There are a few things to consider to make this worth my while though:

• The talk needs to make sense to watch on a small screen. Lots of live code in a terminal with a 12px font isn’t. That is not to say these aren’t good talks. They are just not working as a video.
• The talk needs to be available offline (I use YouTube DL to download YouTube videos, some publishers on Vimeo offer downloads, Channel 9 always has the videos to download)
• The talk needs to be contained in itself – it is frustrating to hear references to things I should know or bits that happened at the same event I wasn’t part of. It is even more annoying to see a Q&A session where you wait for the mic to arrive for ages or the presenter answering without me knowing what the question is.

I’ve written about the Q&A part of videos in detail before and I strongly believe that cutting a standard Q&A will result in more viewers and happier presenters. For starters, the videos will be shorter and it feels like less of an effort to watch the talk when it is 25 minutes instead of 45-50.

At technical events I am OK with some of these annoyances. After all, it is more important to entertain the audience at the event. And it is amazing when presenters take the time and effort to see other talks and reference them. However, there is a lot of benefit to consider the quality and consumption of a recording, too.

Having recordings of conference talks is an amazing gift to the community. People who can’t afford to go to events or even can’t afford to travel can still stay up-to-date and learn about topics to deep dive into by watching videos. Easy to consume, short and to the point videos can be a great way to increase the diversity of our market.

“You are here to talk to the online audience”

When I spoke at some TEDx events, this was the advice of the speaking coaches and organisers. TED is a known brand to have high quality online content. And it is almost unaffordable to go to the main TED events. Which makes this advice kind of odd, but their success online shows that there are on to something.

TED talks are much shorter than the average conference talk. They are more performance than presentation. And they come with transcripts and are downloadable.

Now, we can’t have only these kind of talks at events. But maybe it is a good plan to do some editing on the recordings and turn them into more of an experience than a record of what happened on stage that gets delivered as soon as possible. This means extra work and is some overhead, for sure. But I wonder how much of it could be automated already.

In addition to the poll results there were some other good points in the comments on Twitter and Facebook.

Less of the speaker upper body and more of the slides. Or slides to download. Also, speakers who pace themselves to sound good at 1.5x speed.

It seems to be pretty common by people who spend time watching talks to speed them up. This is an interesting concept. Good editing between slides and presenter was a wish a lot of people had. It shouldn’t be hard to publish the slides along with the video, and something presenters should consider doing more.

Not on the list but “editing” plus a solid couple of paragraphs of what the talk covers and why I should or shouldn’t watch it.

This is another easy thing for presenters to do. We’re always asked to offer a description and title of the talk that should zing and get people excited. Providing a second one that is more descriptive to use with the video isn’t that much overhead.

For English spokers, most of the conferences, no problem. But for non English spokers, massive failure. Reading is really more easy trying to listen and understand. Some guys speaks really fast. So I can’t understand talks.

This is a common problem and a presenter skill to work on. Being understandable by non-native speakers is a huge opportunity. So, some pacing and avoiding slang references are always a good idea.

The possibility to download the videos on tablets, smartphones and laptops so I can see them during commuting time

Offering videos to download should be not too hard. If you’re not planning to sell them anyways, why not?

Also offline availabilty with chapter marks/timestamps. I’ll vote for transcripts for skim reading to get to the gold nuggets. But sometimes a good speaker is an enjoyable 50min experience. I’d rather read transcripts. I never get blocks of quiet. Links to slides to follow along, or (even better) closed captions so I can play them muted If they were shorter and had a PowerPoint with main points to download after

This, of course, is the big one. A lot of people asked for transcripts, chapters and time stamps. Either for accessibility reasons or just because it is easier to skim and jump to what is important to you. This costs time and effort.

And here we have a Catch-22: if not many people watch the recordings of an event, conference organisers and companies don’t want to spend that time and effort. Manual transcription, editing and captioning isn’t cheap.

The good news is that automated transcription has gone leaps and bounds in the last years. With the need to have voice commands on mobiles and home appliances a lot of companies concentrated on getting this much better than it used to be.

YouTube has automated captions with editing functionality for free. Most cloud providers offer video insights.

One service that blew me away is VideoIndexer.

(Yes, this is by the company I work for, but it came as a surprise to me that this offer brings together many machine learning APIs in a simple interface.)

Using VideoIndexer, you not only generate an editable time-stamped transcript, but you also get emotion recognition, image to text conversion of video content, speaker recognition and keyword extraction. That way you to offer an interface that allows people to jump where they want to without having to scrub through the video. I’d love to see more offers like these and I am sure there are quite a few out there already in use by big TV companies and sports broadcasters.

Summary

All in all I am grateful to have the opportunity to watch talks of events I couldn’t be at and I’m making an effort to be a better online citizen by providing better descriptions and be more aware of how what I am saying can be consumed as a video afterwards.

My favourite quote in the comments was from Tessa Mero:

Would be fun watching it with someone so we can discuss the content during/after the video. Need social engagement to make learning more fun.

Videos of talks are a great opportunity to learn something and have fun with your colleagues in the office. Pick a room, set up a machine connected to the beamer, get some snacks in, watch the talk and discuss how it applies to your work afterwards. Conference organisers spend a lot of effort to record talks, presenters put a lot in to make the talk exciting and educational. And you can benefit from all of that for free.

Also published on Medium