In addition to the play-by-play, I wanted to give an overall response to the conference.
Personally, I enjoyed the hell out of it. I applaud Beau and crew for taking a big risk on changing up the format. It really worked for me. There was no decisions about which presentation to see or problems with having two things I wanted to see at the same time. Even though there were a few presentations that didn’t do much for me, it was painless enough to sit through them for 20 minutes. But most of the talks were really, really entertaining, enlightening, and inspiring to me. I really feel like I came away with some new viewpoints and ideas.
But I completely accept that this is just my personal viewpoint. I know that many others did not like the single track format. This from comments I heard and blog posts I’ve seen.
I can totally understand the viewpoint. People pay damn good money to go to a conference (don’t let me get started on conference pricing again), and many of the talks could be considered fluff without any hard content. People (or companies that send people) want to see code, new techniques, tutorials, etc. There were a few breakout sessions each day, which were longer and more in depth, but overall, for the main sessions, there is just no way to “teach” anything in 20 minutes.
Personally, I don’t miss the longer sessions. There were a few sessions, such as Robert Hodgin, or David Carson, which I would have loved to see go a lot longer – but not so that they could teach more, but so they could inspire more. I think it’s still pretty tough to teach a whole lot even in a full hour. The most you can do is introduce a subject and get someone interested in a subject enough that they are compelled to go out and find out more on their own. It doesn’t always take a full hour to do that. Then again, it can be hard to do that in just 20 minutes.
It does seem like Beau and crew are aware that what they did is an experiment and are very interested in getting feedback and evolving into something that is valuable to the community. So if you were there and didn’t like the format, communicate it.