SW Fox, An Endangered Species I fear!
Marcia and I have just returned from Prague, where we were lucky enough to be among the speakers for the third time. This was, and is, a great conference and this year had over 300 attendees.
However, the first time we went there (in 2002) they had 600+. Why do I mention this? Well, I am told that Advisor Devcon this year had about 35 attendees for the VFP Track (contrast that with Advisor DevCon 2000 in Miami where there were over 1200, and with Orlando in 1998 where there were more than 2000).
I also know that last year's Southwest Fox in Phoenix had only just over 100 attendees.
It does seem to be a general phenomenon across the world that fewer and fewer people are going to IT Conferences these days and there are probably several reasons for this. Obvious ones are budgetary constraints and increased pressure on deadlines that reduces 'training' time. However, I also think that the ever-expanding scope of freely available advice and help on line has, for some people (especially those not directly involved), reduced the perceived value of conferences.
However I totally disagree with that viewpoint and consider that conferences offer three huge benefits that cannot be obtained in any other way:
[1] Networking.
In our business, as in any other, "what you know" is important, but often "who you know" is at least as important. How can you know someone unless you meet with them, talk with them and spend time with them? In some ways the actual conference sessions are the least important aspect of a conference. It is the opportunity to meet others who live in the same world as you do and who do the same things that you do, to talk with them and discuss common issues and problems that adds significant value.
Of course you also have to make the effort of going and talking to people! I have never understood people who go to a conference, attend the sessions and then disappear back to their hotel room – they are missing the most important part – the evening chat sessions in lobby, or the bar, or wherever the VFP crowd are congregating
[2] Broadening Horizons.
We each live our professional lives immersed in the day to day issues with which we are concerned. How often do we take the time out to investigate some new facet of VFP? Or to look at some programming technique or issue for which we have no immediate use? Not very often I would wager. This is the shortcoming that on-line forums and help sites cannot address. They are 'problem oriented' in that when a question is asked, the response is an answer to that question. What you do not get is the answers to unasked questions or general information.
For example, in Prague this year I attended a session given by Alan Griver on "VB Futures". This is something that I would not normally spend time researching, or even reading casually about, but it was an immensely interesting and revealing session and I learned a lot. Will I use it 'today'? No! Is it worth knowing about? Definitely!
[3] Learning New Skills/Approaches
One of the most significant benefits that I see from conferences is the presentation of alternatives. VFP is an immensely rich and powerful language and no-one really knows it all. (There are over 1500 Commands, Functions, Properties, Events and Methods, and probably 10 times that number of variations on them). It is almost an axiom that there are at least two ways (and usually more) of doing anything in VFP. What most of us (including myself) do is learn one and stick with it. At conferences I get a chance to see other approaches to problems, other techniques for using VFP and its tools and other people's solutions to problems.
For example, at Prague last week I was asked by someone whether I thought he should use BINTOC() when creating an index on DELETED() so as to minimize the index size and improve transmission over the network. This was something I had never considered, and I told him I didn't know. So we went and tried it out then and there and, you know what, it works fine! So there was something I learned that despite my more than 20 years working with Fox I had never come across before and about which I would never have dreamed of asking on line.
What is the point of this blog? Simply this;
This year we will have only one dedicated VFP Conference in the USA (Fox Forward, although VFP oriented, is, intentionally, much broader in scope) and I greatly fear that it could very well be the last ever 'true' VFP Conference on this side of the Atlantic unless people in the community show their support in a practical way – by going to Phoenix in October!
The conference is being held at the Arizona Golf Resort and Conference Center, Mesa, Arizona and starts with a keynote presentation at 7:30pm on Thursday 18 October. Formal sessions begin at 8:00am on Friday 19 October, finishing at 1:00pm on Sunday 21 October.
In addition there are a number of 'pre-conference' sessions (3-hour workshops) being held on Thursday 18 October.
For full details, and costs, go NOW to http://www.swfox.net/home.aspx and REGISTER
And remember, if we don't use it, we'll lose it - there may not be a "next year" unless we can all make "this year" a success