Programming Conferences - Things That Make Me Angry

Sep 23, 2017

This post is the first in a series on things that make me angry. If this post on things that make me angry happens to make you angry, I’ve created an easy script that you can use to send me hate mail.

Programming conferences can be great fun, but they can also be a hive for obnoxious morons. I would rather spend a weekend with a grumpy gorilla than some of the people I have been locked in these hell halls with. Here is my list of conference characters that make me angry.

Quentin the Questioner

Picture the scene.

You never wanted to go to this talk. You are only here because you spent far too long getting your money’s worth at the snack table. Your punishment is that the better talk on the other track was full and now you are stuck with “Apache vs. NGINX - War of the Webservers”.

The 45 minutes allocated for the talk have expired, and it contained no useful information that could not be found on the ‘Getting Started’ page of each project’s website. The next speaker is twitching at the side of the stage, they have already commandeered the HDMI cable and now they are eyeing up the microphone.

Just before the track chair bursts a blood vessel, the speaker has the audacity to ask - “Does anybody have any questions?”

Surprisingly, you actually have quite a few questions, but they are all the long the lines of “Why are you still here?” and “What on earth convinced you that I would want to spend $400 on a conference ticket to listen to this shit?” so you decide against putting your hand up.

Quentin fires his hand into the air like someone stuck a cattle prod between his buttocks. He already knows more than the speaker does on this topic, and he has spent the last 20 minutes constructing the perfect question to prove it.

“In your experience, which of these web servers would work better on my 8 Core Xeon dedicated server with 64GB of RAM? I host about 25 different micro-services and each of them get a few thousands hits every minute. I have turned off .htaccess file parsing and done quite a lot of performance configuration - will Apache still be significantly slower than NGINX? I have found before that better use of static content and application caching can have more of an impact on performance than migrating webserver technology. What do you think?”

What do I think? I think that if God exists they would prove it by making your laptop battery explode right now.

Sally the Speaker

Sally is a speaker. This is the first thing she will tell you when you meet her, and she will probably find a way of slipping it into conversation when you say goodbye too. Speaker is the first word on her Twitter bio, it is on her t-shirt and she managed to get it into her blog domain.

She starts sentences with the phrase “as a speaker”, blogs about speaker advice and frequently posts Twitter poll questions such as:

How could we best encourage others to become a speaker (like me)?

What qualities do you value the most in speakers (like me)?

What do you think my next talk should be (I’m a speaker by the way)?

The concept that some people want to attend conferences to get the latest information about what is happening in their favourite field of technology is foreign to her. In her mind, everybody should want to be a speaker (like her) and anybody that does not probably has impostor syndrome.

She has spent so long focusing on talking as much shit as possible that she has forgotten any technical knowledge she once had. Thus, all of her talks are now either about giving talks or some trivial social justice theory that essentially boils down to “don’t be an asshole”.

The only thing she has coded in the last decade is a tool to automatically submit talk proposals to call for papers.

Front Row Frederick

Frederick sits on the front row, right next to Quentin.

Both of them arrive at the hall about fifteen minutes before the start of each talk and immediately scramble for the center seats on the front row.

These seats are critical, but not because they provide the best view of the presentation. That is actually rather irrelevant because they spend most of the talk submitting pull requests on GitHub or running npm install on the conference WiFi.

There are two primary reasons why these seats are critical. The first is that it gives Quentin the best chance at being picked at question time. The second is that Frederick knows that when he nods his head, everyone else in the talk can see his acknowledgement that he already knows what the speaker is talking about.

If you offered Frederick a flashing with the words “I ALREADY KNOW ALL OF THIS” bold emblazoned in LEDs, he would probably turn his seat around and just hold it above his head for the rest of the talk.

In the absence of such signage, he resorts to nodding his head up and down continuously like he is at a rap concert.