One conference per day, for one year (2017)
My self-assigned challenge for 2017 was to watch at least one conference per day, for one year. That's the first time I try this challenge. Let's dive in for a recap.
267 conferences
In some way, I failed the challenge because I've been able to watch only 267 conferences. With an average of 34 minutes per conference, I've watched 9078 minutes, or 151 hours of freely available conferences online. Why did I fail to watch 365 of them? Because my first kid was 1.5 years in January 2017, a new little lady came in December 2017, I got a new job, I travelled for my job, I gave talks, I maintain important open source projects requiring lot of time, I'm building my own self-sufficient ecological house, the vegetable garden requires many hours, I watch other videos, and because I'm lazy sometimes. Most of the time, I was able to watch 2 or 3 conferences in a row.
Where to find the resources?
All these conferences are freely available online, on YouTube, or on Vimeo, for most of them. The channel I mostly watch are the following:
It's very Computer Science centric as you might have noticed, and it targets Rust, C++, Elm, LLVM, or Web technologies (JS, CSS…), but not only, you can find Haskell or Clojure sometimes.
My best-of list
In March 2017, more and more people were questionning me, and asked for sharing. I then decided to start a playlist of my “best-of” conferences. I've added 78 conferences in 2017, and 3 new conferences have been added since then.
Thoughts and conclusion
The challenge was sometimes easy and relaxing, or it was very hard to understand everything especially at 2am after a long day (looking at you CppCon). But it has been a very enjoyable way to learn a lot in a very short period of time. Many speakers are talented, and listening to them is a real pleasure. Some others are just… let's say unprepared, and it's good to stop and jump onto another talk. It's also a good way to get inspired by technologies you don't necessarily know (for instance, I'm not a big fan of Clojure, but some projects are really inspiring, like Proto REPL).
Sometimes I tweeted about the talk I watched, and it was quite appreciated too. I reckon because it's a fun and an easy way to learn, especially with the help of video platforms like Youtube.
Am I going to continue this challenge in 2018? Yes! But maybe not at this frequency. It's now part of my routine to watch conferences many times per week. I like it. I don't want to stop.
As a closing note, I would like to thank every speakers, and more importantly, every conference organizer. You are doing an amazing job: From the program, to the event, to the final sharing on Internet with everyone. Most of you are volunteers. I know the work it represents. You are producing extremely valuable resources. Thank you!