The Magic of the Better Software Conference
18 points by indy
18 points by indy
This feels like someone desperately trying to find ways to justify going to an invite-only event that was full of people with incredibly similar backgrounds and low diversity (to the point of implying that it's somehow sinister to think that events should have attendees from outside Europe and the US).
This conference sounds like a small private event with specific goals. That's fine, but if it's promoted/talked about publicly people are going to draw attention to the inevitable lack of inclusion and diversity in attendee and speaker selection that that kind of event will have. Calling people pointing that out 'deranged' is not a good look, IMO, and makes the writer feel incredibly defensive about the whole thing.
I've been a closed conference or two like this and the vibe was strongly "what we talk about this conference stays at this conference". Like we could take inspiration and develop ideas into full works, but it was for our own sakes, not to hype that we've been to a closed conference. This "neener neener it's cool and YOU'RE not invited" vibe is new and rather cringe.
The central principle of this community is organized around a social hierarchy. On the surface level you'd think myself and Zig community writ large would get along with them. We all care about software quality, performance, and elegant simplicity. But they hate me because I neither kiss ass nor demand ass kissing.
From this you can understand the motivation of the post. We are the winners, we are the select few. Kiss our ass and maybe you can join our very cool, exclusive software conference. Kiss my ass and maybe you can try the beta version of my compiler. You can look at any of these people and put them onto a totem pole of how they view each other. Kiss ass up, get your ass kissed down. To them you're either irrelevant, you participate in the ass kissery, or you're the enemy.
I enjoyed reading about the conference, and didn't find the post to have a "neener neener" tone at all. It was written by someone who had a great time with a group of people with similar passions, and who was disappointed by the attacks. Being in a virtual world creates psychological distance that makes people willing to say things that they would never say in person when confronted with a living, breathing human being who is more like them than different.
didn't find the post to have a "neener neener" tone at all
The part about "resentful" commentary came off a rather odd if there's no "neener neener" aspect to it.
My counterpoint would be that they should do such conferences more often. Somewhere remote, all those pre-Eternal-September elites (their word, not mine) in one place, and ideally for much, much longer: It gives the rest of the world some time and space to breathe without those self-proclaimed elites ackshuallying in their way into everything they could piggyback their career on.
Oh hey, this one quotes me! But badly misinterprets my point. I’ve got no problem with the idea of an invite-only conference, I’ve attended a few myself. What I’ve got a problem with is the idea that inviting only the best of the pure, uncorrupted, meritorious software craftsmen will result in a conference full of white dudes. I am absolutely certain that the last two invite-only conferences I’ve attended were improved by selection criteria that attempted to ensure a degree of demographic diversity – simply allowing the organizers to pack the event with their closest friends (like we used to do!) would have led to the exclusion of many of the people who started and led the most thought-provoking discussions.
Do I think you need to grow your conference, or make it more generic, to improve it? Absolutely not, small and focused conferences are great. Do I think the demographic uniformity is a strong sign that your event is of lower program quality than it could be? Yes, absolutely. Software craftsmanship does not correlate that strongly with race or gender and you know it, whether you want to admit it or not.
Oh my days this is so true. I mean not to be racist but invite people all over the world have some criteria. some people are curios about tech but not good enough at it and those are the best people at conferences
I wish the author had properly engaged with some of the criticism about demographics, rather than dismissing it as jealousy or "resentful, deranged tantrums".
If I went to a conference that claimed to have invited the best of the best, and the people who were there all looked like me, talked like me, and wanted to do jiu-jitsu like me, my first reaction would be suspicion that maybe this isn't actually the best of the best, maybe this is just some people that the conference organisers liked.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing - when I go for a drink with my mates, I don't try and set up DEI initiatives just to make sure the group demographics are representative of all peoples of the world. But at the same time, I also don't claim that my friendship group is the best of the best, it's just a bunch of people I like hanging around with.
In essence, the conference organisers are building a social club - one connected to a particular profession, but a social club nonetheless. That's fine in a sense, but what gives me the ick is (a) the homogeneity of that social club, (b) the command that certain members of that social club have in parts of the game development industry, and (c) the attempts at building a mythos around being descended from the original denizens of the internet, and the true elite of the software industry. Those things together make me quite uncomfortable, and I think that's where the comments in the article are coming from.
Yeah, for me this is exactly it. You can have your small, invite-only conference that consists 90% of white dudes. Or you can credibly claim to be the Best of the Best from a software craftsmanship perspective. But you can’t do both at once.
The theory has been touched on by other commenters, but let me share my opinion on what the demographics resulted in in practice (from watching a bunch of the talks after the fact on YouTube).
I did enjoy Casey's talk about OOP, as it had a lot of cool historical stuff and research put into it, but the rest didn't feel as great. It got quite boring and homogenous after like, two of them.
Mostly because everyone speaks from that same background of "I'm an insanely performance-focused game developer rejecting every programming language goodness that's been invented since the early 2000s, and everyone who says those modern affordances are good is wrong and the cause of the blight on the software landscape."
Wow this just piles on elitism on elitism, and then talks about a conference that only invites the best and then lashes out at anyone who might ask why if the conference was choosing “the best” it was basically all white dudes.
This last bit is the reason for my comment: if you’re going to go out of your way to attack the minorities who are very clearly being discriminated against you don’t get to pretend that you don’t know what happened, you are simply saying that you agree with the decision.
I would love to know his alternative explanation for why this conference found skin colour and gender to be such a good predictor of how much a developer cares about the quality of their work, or how good they are at that work.
I’ve worked at a number of large companies and even though in tech they have a large number of exceptionally talented engineers who are white, dudes, and some times they are even non-white, non-dudes, so it’s surprising to me that out of all the most talented developers in the world none of them were present.
This reminds me of a common misconception I've seen online: that open-source is like the gift economy. It's not. The gift economy is an exclusive membership structure, similar to what the article describes. You have to give in order to be part of something that money can't buy. Sometimes I wonder what open-source would look like if it had been inspired by the Gift rather than American libertarianism.
How were the participants selected? Unless there’s a quantitative element then there’s no question it can be the best of the best. Maybe they could have participants selected by election.