Andy Kramek

Our Vancouver Devteach Experience

You may have noticed the blog has been quiet for a couple of weekends. This is because Marcia and I have been out of town to attend the DevTeach conference in Vancouver. As regular readers of this blog will know, I have for many years extolled the virtues of conference attendance and encouraged people to ‘put their money where their mouths are’ and attend conferences.

On occasion it has been suggested that this was an easy position for me to take because I have been, for more than ten years, a speaker at conferences and haven’t actually had to put my hand in my own pocket to attend. The fallacy with that argument is, of course, that preparing a conference session takes many hours of effort – it’s not just a case of throwing a few slides together and dummying up a few code samples, there's a paper to be written to support it all, and many hours of rehearsal review and rework. My own estimate is that a typical 75 minute session requires 80 hours of work, and a 4 hour “pre-con” can take several weeks! So while there may be no direct cash payment, the cost in terms of lost time (and income) can be considerable.

What is the point of this? Well, as you may know Marcia and I decided last year that we were not going to speak at conferences any more and that SW Fox in October 2008 would be the last time we would submit sessions. As it happens, Marcia was not selected for that conference anyway – but either way it was our last as speakers. So this year we decided to attend DevTeach in Vancouver. We might have chosen the Montreal venue last December (it’s a lot closer for us) but we were in England visiting family and so couldn’t make it. Besides, neither of us had ever been to British Columbia and so we decided to add a couple of days up front of the conference and have a little vacation time in Vancouver too.

Why DevTeach? Well, while Marcia does have some existing clients still in VFP, all her new work is in .NET and I have been working almost exclusively in SQL Server for several years now anyway. Since admission to DevTeach (primarily .Net focused) also included admission to SQLTeach (SQL server focused) it was an obvious choice. Not cheap mind you, but obvious. It was also our first non-FoxPro conference for several years. The cash investment alone (fees, flights and hotel), for the two of us, ran close to $5,000.00 – not an inconsiderable sum in these tough economic times.

So, how did we fare? Well, I have to be honest and say that I did not really enjoy the experience. In the sessions that I attended, there were some good speakers who gave solid presentations and imparted a lot of good information. A definite plus there! However there were also some truly appalling speakers who, in my opinion should not have been allowed in front of a paying audience. I am not saying that they were not knowledgeable, or that their topics were uninteresting, but their presentation technique was so bad that it was painful.

No names, no pack drill, but I actually walked out of one session (from the front row where I had been sitting). The speaker began 15 minutes late (he kept waiting [hopefully] for ‘stragglers’), then spent the next 10 minutes on his personal life history and eventually began talking without agenda, structure or plan. After another five minutes I realized that I had no clue what he was talking about and, much worse, felt that he did not know either. What was worse he actually asked me later how I thought he had done!

OK, so not everyone is a natural public speaker in the Jim Booth, Ted Roche or (putting false modesty aside) even Andy Kramek, mode. However, there are simple rules that, when followed, will allow anyone to give a competent and respectable presentation and what I am talking about is people who failed to follow these basic rules. This, to my mind shows a cavalier disregard for their audience who have, after all, paid good money, and also invested their time to come and hear them.

So there were a couple of sessions that I thought were bad. Why am I whining, have I never seen a bad session before? Of course I have (and to be honest, I’ve probably given some in my time). That isn’t why I didn’t enjoy the experience. Taken overall, the technical content (from my SQL-oriented perspective) was at least ‘Good’ and verging on ‘Above Average’. But, as I have so often said, the technical content of the sessions is actually the least important part of any conference.

What is more important is the ability to mingle with like-minded people who share common problems and issues and exchange knowledge and views – i.e. Networking. This is the aspect in which I felt that DevTeach failed miserably. The question is, why? There could be several reasons, and I am not really competent to assess them (after all I wasn’t involved in planning the conference).

The first is that it was unquestionably a very “local” conference. Most of the attendees seemed to be either from the Vancouver area, or to have relations in the Vancouver area. Consequently at the end of sessions they went home. Result – no-one was left in the hotel and there was no real opportunity to network – people were either in sessions, or simply not there.

Second, the hotel layout made it a poor conference venue. The session rooms were split between two floors. Registration, the .Net and related Tracks, the Trade Show and breakfast/coffee between sessions were all on the third floor, while the Keynote, SQL tracks and lunch were on the second. Doesn’t make for a good mixing environment! The only bar was “L” shaped (and quite small) and even in the lobby there was really nowhere to sit and chat (a couple of sofas was about it). Taken all in all it is hard to imagine a less suitable venue for encouraging people to get together in groups.

Third, there was no real conference material. Upon registration we were offered a tote bag and a two page conference schedule and that was the sum total of everything. There was no binder describing the hotel, environs (where should we go for dinner outside the hotel?) and conference facilities (general timings, location of meals, where to look for notices etc) and, initially, not even paper and pens (though they did appear on Day 2 I believe). There was also no conference CD (though I did get an Email telling me that session materials would be downloadable from 6/18 – a week AFTER the conference ended but that the speakers slide decks were available for download immediately). Not really the kind of supporting material I expected or am used to.

Fourth communications in general were weak, in fact, on reflection, they were nonexistent! For example, someone actually complained, in conversation with Marcia on the afternoon of Day 2, that there was ‘not even lunch’  provided. They didn’t realize that lunch was being served on the floor below – but then how would they? There was no information provided at registration, no signs, and no announcements – in sessions or anywhere else - as to what facilities were provided, or where they were located. Worse, there was no indication outside the rooms telling you what sessions were going being held. A simple chart for each room with Topic, Speaker and Time would have been very helpful. I ended up in the wrong room twice and had to do a hurried exit and re-entry when I realized that the topic being presented wasn't what I thought it was going to be. Little things, but…

Fifth, the Keynote. Ah how we love those keynote presentations. In this case the keynote was a demo of Visual Studio Dot_Next. Of course this was of great interest (NOT!) to us SQL Server people. If you are going to combine two conferences, why not have two keynotes? After all the speaker was just one of the regular conference speakers – not an imported celebrity (as at Russ Swall’s “Essential…” conferences), or even an Industry (i.e. Microsoft) expert as at the German Devcon or SW Fox. Couldn't a SQL Server speaker have given a SQL Keynote?

Sixth, out of session activities. This was the last nail in the coffin for me – there were none! Oh yes, the Vancouver IT community hosted a ‘free beer’ party on the Monday night. Unfortunately it was not in the Conference Hotel, nor even close, and unless you were a local (oh, hang on, most attendees were!) it was not an easy task to figure it all out. The only information was in an Email – no announcements, no organized travel (how about sign-up sheets for organizing groups to share Taxi costs….?), no information or directions on how to get there at the conference desk (which was unmanned most of the time anyway). But then this was nothing to do with the conference, and was, obviously, aimed at the local residents.

Apart from this there was nothing. No “mixers”, no “Show and Tell” evening sessions, no “mitt bier” evening sessions, just an empty hotel bar and lobby.  For the first time in more than 10 years attending conferences I was back in my room by 8:00pm every night.

Seventh, there was no passion. I attended 15 sessions over three days and I didn’t see one where I felt that the speaker was really passionate about their topic. For those of you who have ever seen Cathy Poutney, or Doug Hennig, or Jim Booth, Marcia or I (to name but a few) give a session, you will know what I mean when I talk about speakers with passion. The impression I had was that, for the DevTeach speakers, it was ‘just another day at the office’. Most of them made it clear that the sessions were not new and the feeling I got was that it was all a bit of a chore for them.

Finally, one of the things that I have always hated was there, in spades! This conference, more than any other I can remember, suffered from the “Inaccessible Speaker” syndrome. I do not recall, in three days, seeing any speaker outside of a session room – unless they were traveling in packs as when waiting to go out to their speaker dinner.

Trying to go and speak to a speaker is, for most attendees, pretty intimidating. When you have to interrupt a group of speakers who are interacting with each other it is positively frightening. At lunch, what attendee is going to go and sit down at a table of 6 speakers earnestly engaged in high level discussions of (presumably) great weight and import? The problem was compounded at DevTeach because most of the speakers didn’t wear their name tags outside of sessions (so unless you already know them you don’t even know that they are speakers) and so the only the time the speakers were really visible was in sessions.

I know that Marcia and I (and the vast majority of the VFP Speakers, encouraged strongly, and in some cases even required, by VFP Conference Organizers) always made a conscious effort to be approachable, and accessible to attendees. We deliberately tried not to sit at “speaker tables” at lunch, and to ensure that we were always in the bar/lounge after sessions (an easy task for us ). Alas that culture does not seem to have carried over to DevTeach despite its original roots in the VFP community.

My conclusion? Well, as I said, technically the conference was adequate. Most presentations were competent, some were good and only a few were really poor. I did learn stuff; some of it will be directly useful to me, some is potentially useful and some just improved my general background knowledge and understanding. I have no complaints in this respect.

However, when you factor in the ancillary costs (travel time, lost work time, flight, accommodation and meal costs) the return on investment was very poor indeed. So while for a local resident it was probably cheap training, for us it was a very expensive, unstructured, training course with only moderate value. I left knowing no-one whom I did not know before I arrived (though it was certainly nice to see a few familiar faces among the speakers) and with the total number of business cards in my case the same as on the first day.

That was most the disappointing thing. The reality is that the whole conference felt like a commercial training course (where you sit in the classroom with a bunch of people you don’t know and with whom you have no real opportunity for communication and, at the end of the day, you all go your separate ways). From that perspective the training course is actually better value – at least there is a consistent and clear learning program.

Of course, this is just my opinion and others who were there may disagree with me but, as my readers will already know, I always try to tell it like I see it and this is how I saw it. I still believe that conferences can be great value, I just don’t think that DevTeach Vancouver was one of them.

So will we go to another DevTeach? Probably not. To another conference? Probably (right now I am not sure when or where, but I expect that we will) because despite this poor experience I still believe that GOOD conferences amply repay the investment you make in them.