Well, it’s been a week. Vito had a quiet summer, but last week it seems like folks came springing back from the holidays with stories to tell, talks to give and conferences to attend!
We get a notification to our team Slack when a livestream goes live, and things kicked off on Sunday 28th August with 360|iDev 2022. 360|iDev is an independent conference for folks who develop on Apple’s platforms. It’s run by John Wilker, who is passionate about bringing developers together for great events every year.
Things heated up on Wednesday when ElixirConf, ng-conf, and Vue.js Forge all went live on Vito simultaneously.
ElixirConf is the de-facto annual conference for the Elixir community. Elixir was created by José Valim. Fun-fact #1 José Valim was the original author of devise, which is the authentication framework we still use for Tito and Vito. Once upon a time I hired José to do some preliminary work on integrating Facebook authentication with devise, which was before omniauth. Fun Fact #2 José and I spoke alongside each other at Euruko 2011 in Berlin! His talk? "Writing your own programming language". The rest as they say is history.
ng-conf is the annual get together for folks who use Angular. Having seen TSConf on Vito for the last two years, it was GREAT to see another top-level JS community conference using our platform. Hey VueConf folks, the Vito front-end is Vue-based, we'd love to have you! 😉
All three of the above conferences ran a hybrid format, with attendees convening in-person, and Vito providing an online space for in-person folks to access the schedule, chat, livestream for async-catchup and watching the recordings.
Speaking of Vue, we partnered for the third time with Vue School for their Vue.js Forge hackathon event. It’s a cool idea: 1000s of developers come together to build a work app using Vue.js, and while doing so, experienced developers share their experience via a livestream. Such a novel use of the livestream format, and ostensibly a huge success.
Not to be left out, long-time Team Tito supporter Marc Thiele ran the Berlin edition of Beyond Tellerrand. Marc is one of the longest continuous customers of Tito and Vito. I had the pleasure of attending Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf earlier this year, and he attracts a crowd who really cares about the experience. I loved having Vito on-hand during that show to look up the sessions, find out more about the speakers and watch the live-stream while my kid played in the remarkably child-friendly sponsor area.
Finally, Smashing Magazine ran SmashingConf Freiburg, once again hosting folks on the ground and streaming to a global audience. Smashing Conferences always have top-class lineups and I always come away with that fear of missing out on so much learning. I've promised them that I will definitely attend one in the near future. They have a cool description of how they run hybrid.
Hybrid really does seem to be the future, with 5 out of the 6 events above running in-person with an online component. It makes so much sense (it made sense pre-Covid, and even more sense post): opening up these shows to folks who can't travel for any number of reasons, and introduces an async element to conference attendance. Here’s the thing: many folks go to an in-person event for more than the talks themselves. In-person and hybrid don't actually compete with each other, but exist complementarily, serving different jobs. Ultimately, hybrid allows us to broaden our audience and stay connected to our communities even when folks can't be there in-person.
It was a moment of pride and an honour for us to see so many world-class events running at the same time last week, and a real validation that what we’re building has value beyond the echo-chamber of our weekly product meeting.