Simon Willison’s Weblog

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181 items tagged “conferences”

2010

Welcome to Lanyrd | The Lanyrd Blog. We’ve started a blog for Lanyrd, our social conference directory project. We’re off to a great start: “Lanyrd is now listing 1,508 conferences and 5,167 individual speaker profiles. 5,637 people have signed in to the site and made 13,293 edits to our data.” # 11th September 2010, 9:32 pm

Lanyrd—the social conference directory. Nat and my new project, launched today and doing pretty well despite some early server hiccups. Sign in with Twitter to see conferences that your friends are speaking at, attending or tracking, then add your own events. We’re particularly keen on helping people build up a detailed profile of their previous talks, so adding older conferences is encouraged. # 31st August 2010, 7:41 pm

Each speaker gets five minutes to explain their research, with a human metronome banging a waste bin with a big stick after every minute. After five minutes, an eight-year old girl (last night, actually two twins) walks across the stage and says “Please Stop, I’m Bored” and repeats it until the speaker does indeed stop.

Ian Mansfield # 19th March 2010, 11:07 am

Videos from DjangoCon 2009. The videos from September’s DjangoCon are now available, including my “Cowboy development with Django” talk. # 3rd January 2010, 11:02 am

2009

This shouldn’t be the image of Hack Day

I love hack days. I was working in the vicinity of Chad Dickerson when he organised the first internal Yahoo! Hack Day back in 2005, and I’ve since participated in hack day events at Yahoo!, Global Radio and the Guardian. I’ve also been to every one of Yahoo!’s Open Hack Day events in London. They’re fantastic, and the team that organises them should be applauded.

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Where was the ’editorial viewpoint’ at the News Innovation unconference? Martin Belam points out that a problem with unconferences when applied to audiences outside the technology world is that techies who know how the system operates will inadvertently take over the event, skewing the conversation towards technical topics. Not an insurmountable problem, but one that organisers should probably take in to account. # 17th July 2009, 10:52 am

EuroDjangoCon. 4th-6th of May 2009, in Prague. Talk submissions are open now, and registration starts on the 6th of February. # 24th January 2009, 6:54 pm

2008

dConstruct 2008 notes. I missed this year’s d.Construct due to DjangoCon, but from Alastair Campbell’s notes it looks like it was the best one yet. # 15th September 2008, 3:23 pm

DjangoCon and PyCon UK

September is a big month for conferences. DjangoCon was a weekend ago in Mountain View (forcing me to miss both d.Construct and BarCamp Brighton), PyCon UK was this weekend in Birmingham, I’m writing this from @media Ajax and BarCamp London 5 is coming up over another weekend at the end of this month. As always, I’ve been posting details of upcoming talks and notes and materials from previous ones on my talks page.

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It looks like the first ever Django conference will take place in early September in the San Francisco bay area.

Me, on Twitter # 7th July 2008, 5:14 pm

Comet at the Highland Fling. I thoroughly enjoyed the Highland Fling yesterday. Here are the slides from my talk on Comet. # 4th April 2008, 10:13 am

Open Tech 2008—5th July in London. Awesome—I still have happy memories of the last Open Tech (back in 2005), very excited about this one. Once again, it’s only a fiver to get in. # 18th March 2008, 1:03 am

Django at PyCon. Unfortunately I’ll be missing US PyCon this year (I’ll be at SxSW and Webstock in New Zealand though)—but it’s great to see that there’s a strong line-up of Django related presentations. # 21st January 2008, 9:54 pm

2007

Call for Participation for XTech 2008. XTech 2008 will be in Dublin, Ireland from the 6th to the 9th of May. Lots of really interesting topics in the CfP (OpenID, OAuth, Comet, CouchDB...)—deadline for submissions is the 25th of January. # 5th December 2007, 3:28 pm

Future of Web Apps—Past Events. MP3s of talks at the Future of Web Apps Expo are starting to trickle on to the official site. # 14th October 2007, 12:14 pm

OLPC: Give 1 Get 1. The long rumoured “buy two OLPCs, donate one to the third world” scheme is actually happening. I plan to get one; the robustness, battery life and WiFi range should make for an excellent conference / outdoor machine. # 24th September 2007, 11:07 am

Register for dConstruct 2007 (via) These are likely to sell out within the next couple of hours, so sign up quick! UPDATE: They’ve sold out. # 10th July 2007, 11:28 am

PyCon UK 2007. The weekend of the 8th and 9th of September, currently accepting talk submissions. I’ll be running a Django tutorial session. # 10th July 2007, 9:42 am

Oxford Geek Night 3 (via) The date for your diary is July 25th (moved from the 18th). # 2nd June 2007, 12:38 am

Launching Expectnation. Edd’s conference organisation software. I was a reviewer for XTech and the process was completely painless. # 1st June 2007, 8:55 pm

Announcing FOWA Expo—London October 2007. I’m chairing the development track. # 29th May 2007, 10:08 pm

d.Construct 2007 is go! One of my favourite UK events. This year’s theme is “Designing the User Experience”. # 21st May 2007, 12:15 pm

Google Seattle conference on scalability. Google are hosting a conference on scalability in Seattle on June 23rd. They’ve just put out the CfP. # 10th March 2007, 4:37 pm

XTech 2007 schedule: behind the scenes. Expectnation looks like a smart piece of software for conference organisers. There’s surprisingly little crossover with Event Wax—it looks like the two could complement each other nicely. # 23rd February 2007, 11:25 pm

OSCON 2007 Call for Participation. The submission deadline is February 5th; the conference itself is July 23rd to 27th. # 13th January 2007, 10:47 pm

2005

Things I learned at EuroOSCON

Last week was the first ever O’Reilly European Open Source Convention, held in the magnificent NH Grand Hotel Krasnapolsky in Amsterdam. It was the first big budget conference I’d been too (previously I’ve stuck to less expensive affairs such as SxSW Interactive and PyCon) but the money seems to have been well spent. The venue was fantastic and there was a great line-up of speakers, keynotes and panels.

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LUG Radio Live

I’ve been very busy for the last three days. My last two exams (HCI and Marketing) were on Thursday evening and Friday morning respectively, followed by a celebratory barbecue. I was up at 7am on Saturday to get up to Wolverhampton for LUG Radio Live, then back to Bath again by 5.30pm for our graduation summer ball. Finally, I’m heading off to Denmark in the early hours of Monday morning for a week and a bit of camping and Roskilde Let’s hope it’s a bit drier than Glastonbury was.

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Staying social

June is finals month, but the call of @media 2005 is hard to resist. I won’t be attending the actual conference (sadly my student budget doesn’t stretch that far) but I’ll be in London on Saturday the 11th to ride on the coat-tails of the conference.

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PyCon observations

I’m back from my two week stint in the US, and currently suffering from vicious jet-lag (my body wants me to go to sleep at 5am and wake up just past noon). Herewith some observations on PyCon, SxSW and the differences between the two.

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Choice SxSW quotes

My American adventure is ongoing; I’m still in Austin at the moment, but I’ll be off to Washington D.C. in a few days and there’s a small chance I’ll get there via Dallas. This doesn’t leave much opportunity for online shenanigans, but there were a few things from SxSW that really needed a mention. The conference, as ever, was awesome—if not for the panels then certainly for the socialising. If anything I stretched myself too thin this year trying to keep up with the Brit Pack, the WaSP crew, some ex-colleagues from Lawrence and the people I met in San Francisco back in May.

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