DevDays 2011 is Cancelled
DevDays has been canceled, due to poor attendance.
It’s my fault, actually. I took a perfectly good thing (DevDays ’09) and gold plated it until it was a different thing.
DevDays ’09 was one day. So even people who couldn’t get their boss to let them go to a conference could take a vacation day or something. Everyone told us “Great conference! Too short!” So version 2.0 had to be longer, we thought. Two days!
Oh, also, DevDays ’09 was $99. We pulled that off by being cheap. Really cheap. So even people who couldn’t get their boss to pay could afford to spring for the conference themselves. But the cheapness resulted in lousy A/V, bad or non-existent coffee, very rudimentary food (when we had it), no Wi-Fi, and lots of other minor privations. In the grand spirit of 2.0, we decided to make all this stuff better, and to cover the costs by a modest increase in list price from $99 to $499.
Oh, one more thing: DevDays ’09 was in ten different cities. So lots of people could attend without flying anywhere or getting a hotel room. But the grueling schedule of ten cities was incredibly hard work, so we thought, let’s have bigger conferences in fewer cities.
All this great 2.0 thinking had us building a really amazing conference series. We had great venues, great A/V, great food, insane Wi-fi, and of course, a schedule of two days of great speakers lined up in each city.
What we didn’t have was an affordable, one-day, painless, no-brainer conference. So registration was surprisingly slow. And we just didn’t get enough people to make it work. Ooops.
I spent 20 years in the software industry where the marginal cost is close to zero and you can always make version 2.0 better without increasing your costs. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking with it! In the real world, though, $99 conferences are completely different than $499 conferences, and I take full responsibility for screwing up DevDays.
FAQ
Q: I registered anyway. Will I get a refund?
A: Yes, this will happen automatically. If you have any trouble or questions email Alex & Alison at devdays@stackoverflow.com for help.
Q: What about the ServerFault Scalability Conference?
A: That has been canceled, also.
Q: What about the hackathon in Washington, DC?
A: We’ll let you know. We are still planning to hold the Stack Exchange company meeting in Washington, so we will try to organize some public event at the same time.
Q: Why don’t you just scale back to $99, one-day conferences?
A: Unfortunately, the four conferences we planned this year were going to be held at much larger venues and would have cost way too much to put on, so we can’t just trim them back to one day, $99 events.
Q: What are you going to do in the future?
A: We want to work on a much larger number of much smaller events in far more cities, such as meet-ups and individual talks sponsored by Stack Overflow.
81 Comments
As a Boston ’09 attendee, I’d first like to say that the food was surprisingly good considering the attendance fee (not amazing, but it was a good, balanced lunch) and the speakers were rather solid.
What ’09 conferences went well, and what ones didn’t? I think for $99 attendees need to have reasonable expectations (I did, and they were exceeded considering how cheap it was), but if you could figure out something that works for $250 or less, you guys are certainly on to something that the community will enjoy and appreciate, even if its a break-even operation at best.
I’m disappointed that you’ve cancelled, but understand the reasons. My problem is that it’s not just a question of refunding the conference fee – the major part of the cost is (non-refundable) airline and hotel bookings.
I guess I’ll be having a few days holiday in Sydney :-)
I suppose it’ll be a nice break from aftershocks (Christchurch, NZ).
I personally didn’t have a problem with the costs involved, just the lack of information early on. When tickets first became available there wasn’t a single presenter announced and information has only slowly trickled down since then. I wouldn’t pay that sort of money without knowing what I was getting in to.
Any chance on getting Jeff to give highlights of what he was going to present at his “Stop sucking and be more awesome” talk on an upcoming podcast?
I am very disappointed. Not only was I really looking forward to this, but now I have to deal with the non refundable airline and hotel bookings. These are much more than the cost of the conference itself…
BL Stack Overflow team :( I was really looking forward to this also, until I saw the lineup didn’t really apply to me and my team. Price I can understand and I was sorta happy with. I just didn’t really like the Aussie line up :~(
Was hoping for some more ASP.NET MVC & Ravendb/Document Db stuff. *shrug*
Sincerly hope we’ll have some rebooted stuff in Australia, again .. from you gents! *Hi SamSaff .. come down to Melb :) *
Sorry – but there is a lot of difference between paying $99 and a vacation day for a fun day of nerd love – and a multiple day, few $1000 (with airfare and hotel), conference that I need to learn something at.
There isn’t much market for an expensive ‘fun’ conference.
What about an online conference like www.mvcconf.com/ – get the speakers to give the topics they were going to present at devdays. Make it free, and perhaps it will serve as good promotion for an a physical event next year?
Better to fail fast right? Can’t wait until next year!
Agreed with Patrick above – the agenda for Sydney has only just started to look complete. I was confident I’d be coming but $500 on an empty agenda is a bit tough to justify.
I feel like someone didn’t tell you guys the dirty, painful secret of running premium conferences: 65% of the tickets sell in the last 48 hours.
I hope you didn’t pull the plug too soon.
In the meantime, I hope you take a card from Tony Hsieh’s deck and refund anyone that can prove they had airline/hotels booked. They trusted you enough to bet on your event, so now it’s time to demonstrate that you take responsibility when things don’t go well.
Luckily I didn’t book airline tickets or accommodation just in case something like this happened. I’m disappointed, but understand the reasons why.
I was hesitant to buy conf tickets at first, due to extreme lack of information. Work fronted the cost though, so it was to be a free holiday for me.
Perhaps if there is to be a next time, it should be nearly fully organised before putting tickets on sale. The dribble of information was disheartening, and really did feel like an amateurish ‘production’. I think you would have seen a lot more take up if there was a ‘wow factor’ to begin with. It’s all about advertising!
*[Expletive deleted]* I *think* I can cancel the hotel, but not too sure about air fares. This is a most profound bummer, especially as I had decided to fund this myself…
With the changing exchange rate, I may make myself a few pennies on the refund, but I doubt it…
What Pete said. I’m currently organising a (smaller) event which starts this Sunday. 50% of the inscriptions have arrived in the last two weeks.
As for a next time: obts.
Too bad the conference cancelled. I was lucky to have my company pay for it and the trip from Amsterdam to London and fortunately did not -yet- book my hotel&flight. For your information, the first DevDays in Amsterdam I paid myself indeed.
In the Netherlands: free WiFi is not that of an issue, we have good 3G wireless coverage and also anybody has a data-subscription.
Maybe it would be good to work with some local (ICT) companies to host the event. They are always happy to get enthusiastic people in and you can save some costs on conference room and coffee.
I don’t believe the conference was too expensive for people to attend. I suppose the problem is in the late agenda – it looks like not so many people were going to spend two days in the conference just because Joel is awesome :) Btw, I told to my manager about the conference last week and he considered sponsoring conference for my team.
Together with my employer, we did consider whether it would be a good idea to go to the conference but ended up deciding the money would be better spent somewhere else. I enjoy learning other programming languages but as a Classic ASP/ASP.NET shop, there’s little call for Objective-C/Python/etc.
This is in sharp contrast to London DevDays ’09 where I ended up paying for myself and taking a day off to attend.
Well I’m pretty bummed about it all. I’m flying from Perth, Australia to SF for this and VSLive! in Redmond the following week and was looking forward to this conference way more than VSLive really.
VSLive! is more than twice the price again ($1200), is only three days and looks boring by comparison.
Is there anything else going on in SF that I could go to for this week?
Joel you totally need to freshen up on your Myhical Man Month :)
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-system_effect
So Joel – now that you have mid-October free, why not pop out to San Francisco and visit with some fellow travelers?
Put me in the “non-refundable airfare” camp.
For Jesse or anyone else stuck going to San Francisco, I’d be happy to meet up for one of the days – we could go to the Exploratorium ( www.exploratorium.edu ). It’s insanely geeky fun. And since they will be moving in 2013, this is almost a last chance to visit the original location. It’s a great city to be abandoned in.
Who is up for designing the “In SF without my SO” shirt?
Back to Joel – the answer about scaling back doesn’t work for me. Since you are going to have to cancel the arrangements with the larger venues anyway, there’s nothing to stop you from making smaller arrangements. For SF, maybe google would host you. Maybe craigslist would set you up in a public park. Or you could borrow a universalist church for a day. I know that Joel, at least, is an interesting enough speaker that he doesn’t require a projector. So I’m sure something could be done. (I’d offer to help look for a low-cost venue, but what’s the point?)
On the bright side, I now know what Apple early-adopters must feel like.
This is a shame, the guys here were looking forward to this.
If you break the event down into a larger number of smaller events, can you get each event to record all the talks and start a devdays talks site like www.ted.com that way everyone can get to see the best talks from all events. The talks could then be free for everyone to see and the website could have advertising to pay for its self.
Thanks for that honest posting!
As there appears to be a number of developers who are pretty much resigned to travelling on a “business holiday” why not organise a few small “meet-up’s” instead? I’ve always found these to be far better than conferences as everyone can just kick back with a beer at a small venue and get a couple of brief talks from the community.
I’m in the “there’s no way my employer would pay that” group, even though a few days ago I was thinking of asking again as from what I’ve heard the first DevDays in Cambridge (which I sadly had to miss) was fantastic. I registered for the first simply because it was cheap and general.
I don’t think you ‘broke’ dev days, I think you just demonstrated without a doubt that it’s better organized in smaller pockets by the community.
If 100 people are willing to put out .. let’s say 50 bucks for an all day event, you _could_ have all of the perks, coffee, snacks and wifi that people really want with much smaller groups that offer more opportunity to directly interact with the speakers.
Stack Overflow could help shuttle a few given speakers to a few well organized events. Introductions from Joel / Jeff could be done via Skype or something similar.
I don’t know if it can be salvaged this year, but next year just declare ‘dev days’ as a season, and see what people are able to do with it.
Can I recommend you look at Universities for holding them? They have reasonable wifi, and usually have a conference centre, particularly when the students are not there. If you can sign on local organisers, you should be able to make it sensible.
I always book towards the end, I really wanted to attend this in Sydney, and thought I’d better secure my spot today only to find it cancelled. The lineup looked impressive especially since we have a lack of good tech conferences here in Australia ( YOW being the exception).
Jeez..and now where do I get an excuse to fly to London alone?
I suggest to organize just one big event with HQ live streaming coverage.
What kind of an idiot thinks he can take a product and quintuple its price without utterly destroying its sales, regardless of how much better it is?
Protip: It doesn’t matter if the new iPad is ten times faster, waterproof, scratch-proof, and half as heavy; nobody is going to pay $2,500 for it.
I was a bit surprised when the site said “Sold Out” when I tried to register for London yesterday. Guess this explains it :(
Man, am I disappointed. I signed up for the London conference out of my own pocket and was ready to take the time off. I wanted to go to hear directly from the people I read on StackOverflow (Skeet, Gravell), but also to meet others in the community here. I moved to London from Seattle a while ago, but I feel like my network here is a fraction of what it was there, so I was really looking forward to a large gathering of other StackOverflow people.
What I hope for next is that there could be more smaller conferences in different locations (particularly London). Let a hundred StackOverflow conferences bloom….
So I guess the bait(2010)/switch(2011) strategy didn’t work out after all, huh?
Regarding the ‘inadequacies’ of last year I will say that I went to the Amsterdam event (it’s simply the closest to where I live) and I didn’t really have a problem with facilities or food or anything else. For $99 I felt it was completely adequate and had no complaints.
However, this year with the price more than five times increased, it was a different matter (I would have gone to London this year if I had decided to go). So I have decided to go to DevoXX in Antwerpen instead where for not much more money you get five days of presentations (albeit this one is focused only on Java).
P.S. At least hotel reservations you can usually cancel without penalty, but what are you going to do for people who already bought plane tickets? Or are you just going to leave them to figure it out themselves?
I attended the Cambridge DevDays in 2009, which was a bit if a trek from the South West of England. However I’d not been to Cambridge before and I wanted to support StackOverflow for all the benefit I’d gotten from it.
Conferences are always a mixed bag for me – it’s more about chatting to interesting people and being exposed to new ideas.
I learnt a few things and snagged a Coding Horror sticker from Jeff, it’s was worth the cost.
This time round and in this economic environment, I knew I wouldn’t be able to sell the benefits of the conference for what I’d get out of it.
Conferences are big paid for parties for the organizers , where they get to hang out with their speaker friends paid for by the attendees. These attendees get to share in the magic!
From a learning point of view, it’s far cheaper to buy some books and read from blogs than it is to learn at a conference.
I have to say that I was one of those who could not afford the ‘new’ DevDays (I did the first DC DevDays very much on my own nickle, driving down on the day and paying my own way). I was sad to see DevDays grow up into a conference I couldn’t afford, but I’m quite surprised (and sorry) that you couldn’t sell it out.
I’ll happily support another cheap conference, if you hold one within driving distance of Philly again.
Also, I have to say, for a $99 conference, the sandwiches at the first one were just fine – nothing fancy, but they did the job. I wasn’t there for the food, I was there for the speakers, who were very good.
Was disappointed when I heard there would be no conf in Toronto this year, after going to the initial one a couple years back.
I found the food, a/v, and venue all fairly reasonable and am sad to hear that it didn’t work this year.
Hope that you decide to come back to Toronto, or at least Montreal :-)
For meet-ups why not allow the person with the largest rep in a city be able to edit a meet-up contact details page (or assign this honor to another person).
Pretty soon you’ll see a whole lot of meet-ups springing up…
“a modest increase in list price from $99 to $499″ – hmm, not sure I’d call that a modest increase. I would love to have attended but the content and cost is way more important to me than the venue quality.
You supply food/coffee? I don’t expect food to be free at work so why at conferences? Why not let a local cafe(s) sell food on the premises? You get a small cut from them and can lower the overall cost of the days.
* One day all the way. There no need for two days. Made the sessions shorter, there plenty of post-session info on the web if you are interested
* I don’t care about food. Just a quick sandwich and back to business
* I don’t care about Wi-Fi. I can download that movie back at home. Can quick check the emails using 3G
In the end all that matters is good speakers and don’t waste our time
I am glad I did not book dev days, as I would now have issues with non-refundable advanced train fair (a lot cheaper the longer ahead it is booked) and hotel bookings. The cost of last minutes travel is often so high, that you must book a long time in advance; however the risk of a conference or user group being cancelled is often to grate to do so (I will also not book until the speakers can been confirmed).
Therefore if it is not local to me, I am unlikely to go.
What about lots of small local small/cheap stack overflow dev days, in different locations at different times? Rather than trying to set them all up, just plan 2 or 3 within the some region (so the speakers can bet between them), run them, and then repeat every few months with a different region.
I was happy with the food at the 2009 Boston event. I was also fine with not having wifi. Most people now have smartphones to check in at the office etc. I think those issues, while nice to have, are not the important bits.
Keep trying Joel and Co – I’ll be up for the next one. I was skeptical of the new “format” but paid for tickets as I felt it was still worth it. Disappointing but certainly understandable if you had low turnout.
Hi Joel,
Any chance you’ll go back to the $99 dev days? Who cares about the food? If I can spend $99 and learn a ton of great stuff, just tell us on the ticket “Bring your own food and drink, here is the location of the nearest Subway / Dunkin / Starbucks to the venue.”. I can bring my own sammy and coffee. What we’re really hungry for is your knowledge!
David in New York