Our DevTeach Experience Follow-Up
I have one more point to add in respect of our Vancouver DevTeach experience in June of this year. If you read my blog last week you will know that I had a complaint about the lack of conference materials in general and specifically that:
There was also no conference CD (though I did get an Email telling me that session materials would be downloadable from 6/18)
Well, I just downloaded the session materials for the sessions I wanted and I am seriously angry - for several reasons:
- There is no composite download. You have to go to the web site and download each sessions's materials individually. There are not even files by track - only by session. What a waste of time!
- Even the session file(s) are not consistent - some have 1 file, some have a dozen. Why couldn't the presenters have zipped their material into 1 file per session?
- On some sessions, when you try to download the file you get a "Page Not Found" error, other sessions simply have a "No materials available" message
- When you do get something it is, by and large, useless. The vast majority of "Session Materials" turn out to be just the PowerPoint Slides! The few that have anything more are simply unannotated demo files
- I spent more than an hour painstakingly downloading over 50 files, one a time, in the hope of finally getting some value - but all I have gotten are a bunch of PowerPoint slides and the odd bit of sample code
There are NO white papers! Not one! Without a white paper a session is pretty much a waste of time.
What I mean is that at the conference you attend 15+ sessions in three days - how can anyone possibly remember all the details? You NEED the white papers so that later, when you come back to review the material, or look up the details of some vaguely remembered speaker's comment, you have some chance of finding it!
In all my years as a conference speaker I have never given a session that did not include a background paper that could be used by attendees to review the session contents and give meaning and context in retrospect. In fact I have never heard of a conference where the submission of a white paper was not part of the requirements for speakers (and I even have known cases where failure to submit a paper meant you didn't speak at all and that you were dropped from the list!)
How can a conference organization be so appallingly dismissive of their attendees?
I really feel we were ripped off from A-Z by this conference and I have already said that we would probably not attend another DevTeach - now I am sure we won't.
In fact, nothing on earth would persuade me to attend another DevTeach and unless you especially like to waste money, I strongly urge you to try another conference where, perhaps, your money and time are appreciated sufficiently by the organizers that they will make a token effort to ensure that you get reasonable value.
The one thing this has experience has taught me is that DevTeach does NOT deliver value by any reasonable measure.