Ben Scofield

I’ve seen one particular complaint about Ruby conferences fairly often over the past couple of years – people question why the same speakers tend to show up at every event, often with the same (or only gently modified versions of the same) talk. Having organized an event specifically intended to combat that trend, I’ve got some thoughts on the subject.

Firstly, few people (relative to the size of the community as a whole) submit proposals. When the available speaker pool is small, you’re bound to get a number of repeats over a conference season.

Secondly, many speakers just aren’t very good, which turns selecting talks into something of a crap shoot – some speakers are known to provide good, high-quality talks consistently, but most others are a gamble, with poor content or presentation skills. As a result, the known-good speakers are invited to and accepted for more and more events (which, as a side-effect, allows them to hone their skills and get even better), while the less-known speakers are left to lightning talks and other, more local venues (like user groups).

So, how do we fix this? Here are two suggestions:

Submit! If you’re nervous about speaking at a conference, start small – with a presentation to your co-workers or a local user group. There’s a nice path from local, focused events up to national and international conferences if you just look for it. The more people who submit, the more variety organizers have to choose from.

Get better! This is a natural consequence of the former, but it’s certainly possible to improve as a speaker without having regular opportunities to present. There are a number of resources (books, blogs, etc.) that can help with all aspects of the presentation process. Heck, you could also just ask speakers you respect for their advice – most will be more than happy to provide feedback.

Triangle-area friends! If you’re free this Thursday (September 24th), come on out to Bronto’s offices for Refresh the Triangle. I’m going to be giving a talk on The Future of Data – or, less impressively, the recent movements in the database landscape.

This’ll be an interesting presentation, since the Refresh audience is generally a mix between designers and developers. I imagine this particular meeting will be developer-heavy, but I’m working to make the talk as designer- and front-end-dev-friendly as possible. I’ll be focusing on two points: offline storage in HTML5 (applicable to everyone), and the emergence of non-relational databases (like document-oriented databases). Both topics should be fun, and there’s sure to be something to learn for everyone.

So, if you’re in the area, c’mon out and support your local Refresh! Or at least come out for the drinks afterwards…

So I spent a lovely 30 or so hours in Chicago over the weekend for WindyCityRails (as I mentioned previously), and despite the short stay, I had a great time. David and I flew out midday on Friday, and quickly established (and met) our food priorities: hot dogs for lunch, deep-dish for dinner.

Saturday was the conference, which started off with a talk by Dean Wampler on functional programming. I was really pleased to see the talk, especially once I realized that it played on some of the same themes that I’d be addressing later in the day (polyglottism and high school learning, specifically). Unfortunately, I had to miss John McCaffrey‘s talk on Prawn – I enjoy the tool, but I wanted to run through my talk one last time.

Speaking of my talk, it went well. I got laughs at the appropriate times, and the Twitter stream and SpeakerRate ratings both implied that people enjoyed it. I’m still trying to find the right balance between talking about problematic domains and about specific database technologies, however, and I think that might be a fundamental issue with the structure of the talk. I’ve got a number of other chances to fix that, though…

Lunch was excellent, and made even better by some great discussion with Noel Rappin, David Chelimsky, and others around the table. After that, we were back to the tables for Ryan Singer‘s talk on UI design.

I’ve got some mixed feelings about this talk. I was very excited to see it, given that it rated very highly at Railsconf and I missed it there – and the attendees here seemed to enjoy it a lot, too. I, on the other hand, wasn’t particularly impressed. Maybe I’ve just been working with excellent UX and design people for too long, but I disagreed with some of the techniques Ryan discussed, and found his bias against testing design really off-putting. I’m looking forward to the video of this so I can take another look, but so far I’m 0-for-2 on having a good time at design-for-programmers talks.

Noel’s session on testing was up next, and I thought he did a good job covering the material. He went through a lot of techniques pretty quickly, and while many were familiar I found some new nuggets in there, too.

Next, David was up with the latest iteration of his Optimizing Perceived Performance (and the accompanying DBDB application). He’s really growing as a speaker, and I’m excited to see his continued improvement – he was as hilarious as ever, and had a lot of good material to put forward, so it was a very good talk.

I’d love to recap Yehuda‘s closing keynote – apparently he threw out quite a few interesting comments (an alpha for Rails 3 within the month??) – but I had to leave to get to the airport for my flight home.

All in all, WindyCity was a great conference. The regional events just seem to get better and better every year (heck, every month), and that can only bring good things for the community. Congrats to the organizers on a job well done!

Several things have come together over the past week or so, with the result that I’ve pretty much solidified my speaking engagements for the rest of 2009. At each event, I’ll be talking about alternative databases, domain modeling, and related things – they’re all variations on my “Comics” Is Hard talk, though with distinct differences based on the audiences.

First up, I’ll be in Chicago this weekend for WindyCityRails (along with my co-worker David Eisinger). I’m particularly looking forward to Dean Wampler’s session on functional programming here, as well as Ryan Singer’s UI talk (which I missed at Railsconf).

Two weeks from today, I’ll be giving a less technical talk at Refresh the Triangle; the event usually attracts a mix of designers and developers, so I’ll also be showing something of how HTML5′s offline storage works.

In October, I’m helping take Developer Day out to Boulder. I’m not planning on giving a session (just organizing), but I’m really excited about the schedule so far. The week after I get back to NC from Boulder, however, I will be speaking to the Charlotte Ruby group, which sounds like an energetic group of programmers.

Finally, I’ll be speaking at RubyConf in San Francisco in November. I haven’t been out to SF in years, and I’m happy to have the opportunity to get out there for the conference (which is typically one of the best I attend every year), as well as to reconnect with friends in the area.

And that about does it for 2009, unless something wholly unexpected pops up. If you’ll be at any of these events, feel free to drop me a line – I’m always up for a chat about this, that, or whatever! Also, just as a reminder, I generally keep my upcoming event schedule current, while these update posts are a little more rare.

I’ve noticed a bit of a trend among some conferences lately – they’re outsourcing/crowdsourcing talk selection to (usually, but not always) the attendees. The most recent example was Ignite Raleigh, but the precedent for all of these is, of course, SXSW. For the last several years, SXSW interactive (and, starting this year, SXSW music and film) has allowed anyone to vote on submitted panels for inclusion in the conference.

One of the effects of the panelpicker process is that submitters flood the internet with pleas for votes – and I’m no exception. I’ve submitted two panels:

• Mind Control: Psychology for the Web – This will be a much-expanded version of the talk I gave at Ignite, in which I describe the heuristics we use to make our way through the world, how they both work and fail in the online environment, and how we (as designers and developers) can use that knowledge to get people to do what we want them to do.
• Difficult Domains: Alternative Databases for the Web – This will be the updated version of my “Comics” Is Hard talk, which I’ve presented at several events. It’s fun to continue speaking about this topic, because the state of the field is changing very quickly. New key-value stores are popping up daily, it seems, and there are dramatic changes afoot in the document-oriented database realm. Heck, Neo4J just released a new version, as did MongoDB! Exciting times, my friends…

So, there’s my call to action. Go, vote ‘em up! And while you’re there, the other Viget proposals would like some love, too.