The conference is this week & the program looks like the kind of thing that would appeal to lobste.rs people.
Program: https://2021.programming-conference.org/program/program-programming-2021
Blurb: “The International Conference on the Art, Science, and Engineering of Programming is a new conference focused on programming topics including the experience of programming. We have named it ‹Programming› for short. ‹Programming› seeks for papers that advance knowledge of programming on any relevant topic, including programming practice and experience.”
It’s a paid conference, but tickets are cheap & the conference is fully online, so people can drop in and out of talks that interest them. The discussions of “Seeing Like a State” and “The Death and Life of American Cities” as applied to programming are my personal catnip, but hopefully there’s something of interest to most lobsters people.
Thank you for posting this, there is a lot of very interesting events planned. Guy Steele talk will probably be great and I’m also interested in the CTRDs (no I didn’t misspell CRDT — this is a very related concept though, another lattice datatype)
Aside: I can never see CRDT without hearing “curiously recurring data-type” from C++ which completely drives out the acronym that everyone else uses!
NB. If people cannot afford tickets then the conference organisers have made it pretty clear that they’re happy to make places available - there’s a contact email on the conference site to request a ticket.
How well do online conferences work? I’ve read good things about how FOSDEM was organized but only after it was over and too late to attend!
Watching recordings of other conferences, quality seems to really vary but that’s still not the same as expericing the conference live.
I attended two online conferences in 2020 & enjoyed both. You do miss out on the “meeting people in the hallway” aspect, but being able to dip in and out of talks & catch bits you’re interested in without having to leave the office is great. I can see a future for both remote and in-person conferences - the former are so much better for people with disabilities, or those of us who simply don’t have the time (or money!) to take days / a week for a conference.
The same goes for speakers too: you can get some great people to talk at your conference if they only need to show up for an hour or two & get the option to take in as much of your conference as they want instead of having to take days out of their schedule.