Features of regional conferences. Why should a speaker leave the MKAD?

Last summer, we held a meeting of DUMP program directors, who, moreover, are often speakers of various IT conferences. And one of them said: “Before, you yourself searched for conferences and submitted applications, about 3 years ago you went to the place you were called to, and now every week you get an invitation to speak somewhere.”

Conferences and meetings in Moscow are enough to become a famous speaker without leaving the MKAD. Well, well, you can go to foreign conferences if you call 🙂 What is the profit to go to the Urals, to Siberia or the Volga region? Hm. They asked those who are already famous, but still travel

Heroes of our blitz interview

Sergey Abdulmanov Milfgard

Some people think that Sergei Abdulmanov = Mosigra, but no. In 2019, Sergei left the operating activities of the company, and now manages his own PR agency Loft, as well as special projects in Tutu.ru.

A mathematician by training, he worked as a newspaper editor, managed the advertising department, was the owner of an IT company, and also wrote a book, which became the “Business Book of the Year 2016”.
Here is Sergey’s performance at DUMP 2018 “What exactly is the difference between the selling text”

Grigory Petrov eyeofhell

He began his career as a programmer in the late 90s: first as a developer, then as a development manager. He participated in the creation of Radmin and Advanced IP Scanner, promoted interactive NPTV and Voximplant programmed telephony. Generalist, amateur neurophysiologist, organizes development, conferences, hackathons. Now – Head of Developer Relations at Evrone.

Gregory Report at DUMP Kazan “Microservice communication: REST, JSON, GraphQL or gRPC?”

Polina Gurtovaya

Frontend developer at Evil Martians. Preaches Graphql, image optimization and WASM. He likes to write articles for the Martian blog, speak at conferences and reinvent the wheel 🙂

Pauline’s performance “(un) perfect pictures and other pixel magic” at DUMP Kazan

Roman Nevolin nevoroman

Senior Software Engineer at Groupon. Application developer for bioinformatics on .NET, for chemists in Java, for financiers in Haskell and many other interesting things. He likes to study new areas and languages, and then talk about them at conferences and, if necessary, use them in production.

Blitz survey

Hello! Let’s talk about you as a speaker. How many speeches did you have at IT conferences over the past year?

Sergei: Couple, I usually go to retailers
Gregory: 17 pieces
Pauline: Exactly over five
Novel: Seven (count and mitaps)

What is the approximate correlation between metropolitan (Moscow, Petersburg) and regional performances?

Sergei: About 8: 1
Gregory: One performance in St. Petersburg, six in Moscow, one in Berlin – the rest in the regions
Pauline: 1:> 5
Novel: Four metropolitan, two regional. Where did another performance go, Roman? 🙂

Conferences have been propagating like mushrooms for the last couple of years 🙂 By what criteria do you choose where you will speak?

Sergei: Either I know the organizer well (hello, 23derevo), or this conference is interesting to me for the speaker staff as a participant, or this is a matter of a fee that pays for time. Preference for conferences in regions where I have not been – you can climb the city there and see something beyond.
Gregory: Mostly, I rely on the “scoop”. As a conference organizer, I see a lot of “calls” looking at the site, CFP design, offers for partners and other things. Well, if possible, I try to call the organizers on a zoom basis, asking them about the conference for five minutes, what is their “vision”, who is expected to visit, and so on.
Pauline: Many of my colleagues speak at conferences, so first I ask them. Next, I look at the conference description, program, sections, speakers, I am looking for reports from this conference, etc.
Having collected enough material, I try to evaluate the benefits that I will get (networking, new programming tricks and interesting impressions) and the benefits that I can bring to the audience. If everything fits together – send an application 🙂
Novel: Basically, just for employment, location and more. If I have the time and energy, then I do not mind going to almost any conference, but more often there is simply no way.

Is there something in common between regional conferences: participants, level of reports, atmosphere?

Sergei: As a rule, you need to look very carefully at who is standing next to the section. It may turn out that the selection of speakers is quite random, and there are chances to speak at all to the wrong audience who are interested in the report.
Gregory: In fact, a conference in a region can be much cooler than an average conference in Moscow. It all depends not on the venue, but on the people who make this conference.
Pauline: It’s hard to find something in common. Any conference (regional or local) is difficult, but interesting. At all the conferences that I attended, the reports were up to standard. A regional conference is a great occasion to meet new people and explore unfamiliar places 🙂
Novel: The most noticeable difference in terms of audience – it is often less active than in the capital. Plus, as a rule, regional conferences do not have a fixed topic – such a conference simply will not gather enough people.

Give an example or a couple of examples when you got the benefit or pleasure from having gone to a conference in another city?

Sergei: The BIF is in Irkutsk, there after the conference we went to Olkhon on Lake Baikal with two loaves of speakers and climbed everything. The latest Ecom – there I learned a couple of new things from the reports. From Essen desktop brought a suitcase of games)
Gregory: New contacts, interesting questions, impressions at last. After speaking at one of the conferences, I rode back on the train with Oleg Bartunov, a key developer of PostgreSQL, he told a lot of interesting and useful things.
Pauline: Almost any trip of mine is a similar example! There is a special IT atmosphere in any city. In addition, the regional conference is a great occasion to visit the local Martians 🙂
Novel: It is difficult to give specific examples, it is always interesting! The coolest thing is the opportunity to go to other cities, see how people live there, chat with them.

What will your topic be about DUMP2020, and why should participants choose it among 9 threads?

Sergei: About how to talk with a client base and collect feedback from it. There is a technique with which everything will go simply and smoothly, and you’ll be able to spend ten times less time than usual qualitative research. And what can you do next with these people.
Why choose my report? To developers – because you do not care sooner or later get on the front line and deal with the user. Software – because it’s about your money. The rest – listen to the harsh Russian reality and common sense.
Gregory: This will be a report on the modern frontend by the generalist. Instead of talking about new cool things or getting into the guts of another technology, I’ll tell you about the global pains of the industry, how we solve these pains and what we pay for it.
Using the example of Nuxt, Next and the new concept of “JAMStack”, I will show which path the front end has taken, why it is so complicated and what we, as developers, can do with it. Well, except how to read the manuals on the webpack and cry, of course)
Pauline: In short: o WebAssembly. A little more detail: about how and when you can use WebAssembly, as well as quite a bit of hardcore about v8 🙂
I think that how wasm will develop will affect the further development of the entire frontend.
Novel: My topic will be about the use of functional languages in the daily development of business applications. Perhaps it is distinguished by a combination of practicality and unusualness – very many develop such applications, but few do it in a functional style. The opportunity to look at common problems from a new perspective is always interesting.

Regional conferences are …

In our opinion, first of all – a place uniting the regional IT community. On the one hand, there is no narrow specialization of the conference. On the other hand, it is a special (sincere, lamp, etc.) atmosphere. Because there, at a conference, once a year, you meet with classmates and former colleagues, get out of your projects and your company, and communicate with speakers of world-famous companies. As one of our participants once said: “DUMP is always a small celebration!”