tl; dr: Magic in Miami, a limited number of tickets for PyCodeConf are available for you at $300/each. Don't forget to pick up your hotel rooms at $179/night. Hooray.

When I first saw that GitHub was producing their own conference series, I was quite stoked. GitHub has easily become a great asset for conference organizers both in terms of advertising visibility and their willingness to sponsor conferences of every ilk in almost every programming language. They support the community at a deep level both in their drive to turn coding into a social activity (through various GitHub meetups) and their funding of people with crazy ideas (aka conference organizers). I have always thought highly of the team at GitHub and so when I heard they were entering the conference space, I will admit I was both giddy and concerned.

The concern comes from the obvious overlap between the CodeConf events and JSConf events in terms of nature, style, and love of community. They are willing to showcase some arguably risky presentations and provide the critical social event backbone that makes conferences a success. In crafting JSConf, Laura and I stumbled into a lot of the decisions that made the conference what it became - CodeConf evolved from GitHub's experience both as attendees, sponsors, and speakers at various events of all types. It is because of this that I actually turned my concern into a desire to help CodeConf grow by lending as much of a hand as I could. We need more events driven by passionate groups of people who have experienced all sides of the conference world. Speaking at most conferences sucks, sponsoring most conferences sucks, and attending most conferences -- well that is hit or miss depending on your expectations.

I have helped GitHub organize their latest conference, focused on the Python community. Our experience of organizing a conference in a very well established community like Python has been quite interesting. The Python community is a very proud group and rightfully so, their community has been tended quite well by the Python Software Foundation (PSF) and a benevolent dictator. Our creation of a conference about Python is by no means an attempt to undo or insult these groups, but to add a new voice to the chorus. We have selected an amazing batch of speakers representing the aspects of Python that make it great; including, but not limited to, the PSF, PyLadies Advocacy, SciPy, Django, Microframeworks, and PyPy (and a little JS for good measure). We did this to bring together a nice cross cut of the broad Python community into a single event and allow you to get the full breadth in two jam packed days. To go along with this, we are putting together a line up of social events that will rival JSConf starting with an opening party on Wednesday night October 5th and ending the evening of Friday, October 7th.

I believe deeply in the benefit of organic conferences driven by love for the communities that they represent. I have to otherwise I wouldn't continue doing what I do with JSConf. I would love for all communities to experience the magic of sharing drinks with "the best and brightest" on a completely level playing field. It is the anti-thesis of elitism, if anything it is a deliberate breakdown of such things. PyCon and other PSF events do this as well, PyCodeConf is just an attempt at a different take on the concept. Both can and should co-exist happily.  Part of the reason for choosing Python is that it seemed well suited for the type of environment we are working towards BECAUSE of PyCon, not in spite of it. That is why I am doing something that is absolutely crazy. I am, as a representative of JSConf, sponsoring PyCodeConf.

Most sponsorships mean that the organization gets money to create a better event and I have discussed this over with the GitHub team that the best way to do this is to get even more people there. So we are sponsoring to obtain a bigger space AND... Get ready for it...

OFFER TICKETS AT HALF THE REGULAR PRICE

This price reduction is only available as part of our sponsorship and as such there are only a few tickets available at the lower price (sorry I am not made of money). The offer is only open until September 9th or we reach the number of tickets covered by the sponsorship. If you already have a ticket, you rock, but unfortunately we cannot do a refund to the lower price (buy one for a friend/co-worker!). If you have been on the fence about attending PyCodeConf, consider this a big push. We want this conference series to grow and we want you to be a part of it, now is your chance. If you don't program in Python, please pass this on to someone you know who does. If you are taking advantage of this, be sure to pick up your hotel rooms while the block is still open until September 9th.

Organic Technical Conferences FTW. Hooray!

One of the main appeals of JSConf for the past two years running is the level and quality of presentations that are displayed by our speakers. Given that we are right in the middle of announcing our speaking roster for JSConf US 2011, I felt it would be a good idea to provide some insight as to how we select speakers and thus how we are able to curate a conference that seems to always be at the forefront of technology, not at the mid point. My hope is that you take this knowledge and apply it in conferences and events that you might curate AND demand better from other conferences. I don't know about you, but I am quite tired of seeing the same set of speakers presenting the same set of topics over and over and over again. The current process of having "elite" or "must-have" speakers only creates an elitist and "good-ole-boy" community, both of which are complete crap and we should actively try to tear down, not build up or perpetuate.

Motive

First I want to start out by describing my intentions for JSConf. I believe any conference at the national or international level has a responsibility to its attendees and its following community at large to present the next generation of things. I believe that conferences are not a platform for repeating what has already been said, but a launchpad for announcing what is new, different, and amazing. When a conference costs more than $500 per attendee, I, as an attendee, demand to see stuff that I cannot see on the internet for free. This is in part why conference attendance is down for most events, but consistently (and crazily) sold out for JSConf and JSConf-like events - its new content that I can't get elsewhere regardless of the cost. Think about it from a business perspective, would you pay $1200.00 (plus airfare and hotel) for your employees to go and see presentations that clearly blip.tv, vimeo, or youtube has for free? On top of that, most people attend these events for the "hallconf", which is little more than job interviews by sponsors who are trying to pick up the talent, your talent that you just paid $1200 to $2000 to send. Of course you wouldn't, but you would probably pay twice as much for your employees to WANT to be in the presentations BECAUSE it will make them ahead of the curve, thus not being "picked up" and even better coming back jazzed that they work at a company that is at the forefront of the world. That, that feeling, is what we target for JSConf.

This is one of the biggest driving forces for how I structured JSConf and specifically speaker selection. I have been both a company owner and an employee so I have seen both sides of the coin. When we pick speakers for each JSConf event, I am evaluating each one almost with a strong multiple personality disorder, where I am viewing it as:

• a business owner in that would I send my people in order to get a competitive advantage by having my employees at the lead of technology.
• an attendee and would I feel that I have to see this, like if I miss this talk would my life be over. 
• a sponsor from the perspective of will this bring out the best people, and thus make it the event to sponsor and more important, the event that we have to be a part of.

As you can see, the target for each one is creating something that is "have to see" and most importantly "can't find elsewhere". This means breaking the general expectation or model of how speakers are selected. Most conferences do selections based on sure-wins or safe bets, they pick presentations that they can see beforehand in order to ensure that it and the conference is good. Note, I said good - not great. Most conferences also pick speakers that they know personally and are friends with and perpetuates the previously described elitist society. Both of these suck and make for a par but rapid approaching sub-par speaker roster. Why do they suck, if you look at it the previously described contexts, you can clearly see that talks selected like this are clearly missing the mark.

The Process

It is easy to pick a part others, but it is harder and better to provide answers. So here you go. To select JSConf speakers, I first make a list of all titles, descriptions and UUIDs, but specifically excluding names and contact information. I go through each of these proposals and categorize them into one of a handful of pre-determined groups. For JSConf I use the following:

• Mobile - anything relating to small device (phone/tablet) development, design, testing, etc. If it moves, it goes in here.
• Nerdcore - anything that is complete and total mindsex in terms of philosophy, theory, coding practice, etc.
• WTF - anything that is complete insanity and most likely vaporware OR bullshit or some combination there of.
• Infrastructure - all things related to infrasctructure elements (networking, SCM, tools, etc). 
• Data - all things related to data transport, storage, and querying.
• Library - anything related to client side javascript libraries (jQuery, dojo, Moo, Prototype, etc.) 
• UX/UI - all items related to the visual side of life.
• Other - every year there is something insane that is not categorizable above.

Once all of the talks are categorized, I evaluate each group and rank them based on the merit of their title and description. I do this for many reasons. First, the topic needs to be compelling enough to steal my heart and mind if it isn't no "celebrity power" will help that. I don't care who the speaker is. Second, by doing it via groups and ranked within the group, I ensure balanced content at the conference because I am pulling the same number from each group and the top of each group. Finally, and this is my most important point, I AM SELECTING FAIRLY. I am not picking talks because they are friends or because I have to hit a minimum quota of gender or race, or any other hairbrained reason. I am picking talks solely and completely on their merit and importance OF THEIR TALK. The reason I am harping on this point is that many people belive that the way to increase gender and racial diversity at a conference is to tokenize the speakers. To have a token female speaker just to say "we have a female speaker". Worse I see people blackmailing conferences about this point BEFORE A SINGLE SPEAKER IS ANNOUNCED. Hell, it happened to JSConf (US 2010). That is not gender and racial equality - it is bullshit. TALKS SHOULD BE SELECTED BASED ON THE TOPIC NOT THE SPEAKER. PERIOD. Increasing gender and racial diversity needs to start by increasing the number of speaking proposals coming from those groups, not by selection committees force-adding them. This is a very strong stand on a very touchy subject, but it has to be made and I will not budge on it. I have been very happy to see more and more gender and racially diverse submissions in JSConf and that shows up through our resulting selection. 

Once talks are categorized and ranked, I look at the names of the speakers. If they have spoken on the same or similar topic at any other conference they are docked half a point. If they have been making the rounds of pimping their topic (podcasts, interviews, etc) they are docked half a point. If they are friends or colleagues of mine, they are docked half a point. If they are a "celebrity" they are docked half a point. As you can see from this ranking, it actually hurts you to be closer to JSConf if you want to speak. Doesn't mean its impossible, but makes it very hard. Brian Leroux is one of the greatest people I have had the pleasure of meeting through JSConf, he is also one of the most unfortunate. I invited him to speak at the first JSConf based off these exact same metrics. His talk was absolutely epic, it was the perfect balance of professional unprofessionalism. He went on to present at almost every conference there after even to this day his line up of conferences rivals that of Doug Crockford. At JSConf 2009, he and phonegap were known to a small set of people and his presentation was killer because of that fact. The unfortunate side is that because his talk was so awesome, it became a hinderance from having him speak again. Honestly I would love to have Brian present, he is the right type of crazy for JSConf, but for reasons listed above, it is very hard to do so. Hopefully Brian doesn't hate me too much for this, but I think he understands because (luckily for the conference) he keeps coming back each year.

The Downside of Being a JSConf Speaker

One thing I do want to note, I will add a full point to the ranking of a talk if the item is something that is completely and totally insane. If there is realistically no chance in hell that this talk's topic is actually accomplishable - I will add (positive) a full point. I do this because I want that kind of crazy (Brian's kind) at the conference. I purposefully push myself to take the high-risk, high-reward topics that make people go "holy crap, my mind was just blown". You can easily pick out the talks that have this point because they are generally the most memorable ones from the JSConf archives (Ryan Dahl, Brian Leroux, Tobias Schnneider, The Robotic JavaScript talk, etc.) They are high risk at the time we make selections (5-6 months prior to the conference), but they serve two sides, they strongly force the presenter to accomplish what they have laid out AND they give attendees a view of tomorrow, not of yesterday. This is a major difference between JSConf and JSConf-like events AND all other conferences. Conference organizers should take risks, safe bets are good for this year, horrible for next year.

"My Talk"

Once the rankings are settled, I take the top two from each category for my first round of selection. Nearly all first round options say yes, and we have our speakers for that year. Well almost complete. I always challenge myself to find one insane talk. Something that has no right being presented at JSConf, but yet for that reason becomes the most critical to have. I call this "my talk" because I get to pick it with wild abandonment. Last year, this was Aaron Quint's amazing bacon talk, which resulted in one of the best talks I have ever seen, anywhere. It set the tone for JSConf and gave people a lot to think about on many topics. To this day, when I pitch sponsorships, I lead with the bacon talk. I say this is the kind of talks we have at JSConf and this is why you must be part of this event. Most organizers wouldn't do that, arguably it is suicide to have a talk like this at a "professional" conference. However, that is what brings people back year over year and also what causes the energy of JSConf to continually expand and accelerate.

Conclusion

There you have it, that is how I pick the speakers for JSConf, that is how we make it "OMGzAWESOME" each year. It is also why when speakers are announced a lot of the "established leaders" look at the list and scratch their heads. It really doesn't and wouldn't make sense, not before the talks. After the conference though it is very obvious especially as time goes on and the excitement and energy of the talk and how it "changed my life/view/world" spreads. I would ask that we stop blackmailing conferences into diversity and instead do our best to solve the problem where the problem lies. Hint, organizers aren't saying "oh crap that's a woman I can't have her speak" when they review proposals and to even think like that, let alone tweet about it, that is just insane. If you want a more diverse speaking population, encourage what you want to see speak to put in proposals. It is that easy. Most people don't even know they can, worse most people don't even know that they should. You look at how we pick speakers and it is unfair for established speakers at the benefit of new speakers, perfect for making a more diverse speaking population. Finally, I would love to see others use this technique for speaker selection - we need crazier speakers but more importantly we need conferences that are showing us the future, not the past.

P.S.

A quick note about first time conferences, this article isn't targeted to them. I actually encourage you in the first year to invite a "name" in order to essentially bootstrap your event with their "social capital". We did it for JSConf (in full disclosure). This article is more targeted for established second, third, fourth year conferences. 

Note: Like many in this series, this has been written over many months - I have no idea what was in it when I finally hit publish. Sorry.

There are many reasons to organize and run a conference, most of the "upfront reasons" are unfortunately bunk. I have experienced this on my own and corroborated with many conference and event organizers that I try to help out, here are a list of things that initially go through your head, depending on what else is going on in your life:

If I can pull this off, ...

• I will have a lot higher visibility in the community!
• I can use the connections and marketing to help drive business to my consulting/product company!
• I will make a name for myself!
• I will be somebody important!
• I will make bring together people and all will be happy and right with the world!
• I can change the (world, community, or mindshare) for the better!
• I can do something amazing that will be self fulfilling.

I can tell you that pretty much everyone of those ends up not happening or quite to the contrary the opposite happens. I will admit that when I started JSConf and NoSQL East I firmly believed every single one of those at some point in the journey. Worse still, I EVEN believed some of these during JSConf 2010, as if the first time around had not taught me anything. So I would like to share with you some of my experiences and thoughts on this matter, especially because going into an event planning with the right foresight is probably the best thing you can do have to prepare you for the "revisionist" hindsight you will undoubtable experience after your event.

Let's start with the obvious issue, the desire or feeling of wanting to do something that someone else thinks is amazing. Beyond basic instincts (food, water, sex, etc.), human psyche is driven by a burning desire for recognition - it is an annoying facet of life we all deal with and the more you might possibly have, the more you desire it. That just sucks. Worse for the conference organizer is that you are pulling together huge names, massive fame, and organizing amazing things - so your inclination is for that fame limelight to be shed on you. It is nature, there is little you can do about it. Most technical people will attempt to rationalize this desire into a convincing argument that "If I can bring people together for this event, I can figure out a way to benefit". Right, it is obvious, it is how advertising works.

Step 1. Draw the audience.

Step 2. ...

Step 3. Unicorns and Rainbows

But rounding the corner of organizing an event and receiving any degree of fulfillment from said event is, at least in my experience, one of the hardest accomplishments. Ever. Why is it so hard? Well simply put, it is because you are afraid of failing, of essentially throwing a party no one shows up to and so you make it the best damn party. In part it is due to the premature adoption that a conference organizer has with their event, in part it is the desire to make the best damn event ever - either way you are inclined to invest (time, effort, energy, hopes, dreams) way above and beyond what the event itself can ever return. In part, thats the passion of the event that shines through to attendees and makes them happy to have attendeed, but it has a dark side.

After every single conference I have thrown I tell myself "I will never ever do this again, fuck that." It is a large amount of work from gathering (and herding) speakers, gathering (and also herding) sponsors, and finally herding attendees - it's insane. Add to the mix vendors who drastically overcharge and then still proceed to nickel and dime you and it is enough to put anyone into an early grave. But this article is not about complaining it is about outcome. There is an inherent problem with conference organizers, they start the journey without knowing the end. Some (/me raises hand) become addicted to the adrenaline rush of actually pulling it off, some forgo the risk and take the profits, still others leverage the conference as a means to catapult themselves into the limelight. I personally have thrashed internally as to why I do JSConf. I hold back and even downplay my own personal efforts with the conference because I think it is what the community needs/deserves, which generally speaking goes according to plan - BUT that means no one notices. Ask any JS person who the top movers and shakers are and I highly doubt I would even be thought of let alone mentioned. Reason why? Simple I make it a point to be more behind the scenes and thus even though I am basically spotlighting the next year of JS (And other language conferences talks) the speakers take the "limelight", deservedly. My personal ego thrashes constantly about this. I am human after all. My reason tells me it is pretty pointless, we spend all the money making an event memorable and yet I am purposefully circumventing that. WTF. It is just eventuallity and I do tell myself it is for the best in the long term.

What has becoming increasingly worse is the haters who jump all over "risky" items. We make JSConf a place for experimentation and while it is good to see conferences leverage those experiements (I love txjs) it is also tough to see others plunder it out right. Whether it be groups of people looking at JSConf saying.. there is something there, lets figure out how we can "extend" it, all without even emailing me OR bigger more established conferences taking our speakers, event ideas, or even themes and repurposing them. I get that this is a competitive market - I really do - and that I don't have a trademark on awesome (I tried) but seriously it sucks goat testicles and it is just an eventual outcome of doing something different. You incur the risk, others take it to market cheaper after you've proven it. What was very nice the first year of JSConf, which most people completely gloss over is the "OMG THIS WAS THE BEST EVER" articles. I have watched year after year and event after event as those amazingly long and beautiful articles have disappeared. Replaced by "jsconf was great" tweets, which as you can probably guess are nice, but in no way fulfilling. You want to make a conference organizer happy? WRITE A LONG ASS BLOG POST ABOUT HOW THE EVENT WAS EVEN BETTER THAN SEX. That, as best I can tell, is the best and only gold of conference organization. Trust me, you have no idea how awesome it was the three weeks following JSConf 2009 reading those, it is what inspired me to do 2010. 

In the end, I have resolved myself to the outcome for JSConf being a couple great parties I get to attend (at the cost of organizing) and a couple nights in an awesome hotel room. Thats why we pick swanky hotels for JSConf and throw awesome parties. JSConf (or any conference of substance) can't sustain its organizers and thus they have to return to their 9-to-9s in order to pay the bills. And thus you have it, conferences like JSConf, FunConf, ShnitzelConf, TXJS, etc. are labors of love remember that next conference you attend and hug the hell out of the people organizing it. Especially if you can do it at the most awkward moment (closing speech is best).

Sorry for the dark look on the other side, but hell thats what this series is about. This isn't meant as a "cry for me", but more just a peek at the other side, please take it as such.

I just announced promotejs.com, which as described in my talk at the epic JSConf.eu is the following:

Through pirate techniques and guerrilla SEO we can change how search engines present answers to common queries about our language. By driving traffic to the proper documentation, we can change search rankings and ensure that people interested in JS are connected with the proper educational resources. First target for promotejs, unseat w3schools.com for standard new JS developer queries with proper MDN documentation.

Also please note that this was in the context of improving the experience for new entrants and those continuing their education of the JavaScript language. When you boil down the mission statement of promotejs and the talk in general was this very simple point:

It is up to the experienced developers to point out the proper documentation for the inexperienced. 

Of course the first group to get excited by this, and properly so, where the developers who followed developers that were in attendance of JSConf.EU. Unfortunately by the time we had reached the afterparty the other side of the conversation had arrived. The so-called SEO Experts who, without full context, go off and explain how this is stupid and will not work. Awesome, there is nothing like hitting the hornets nest of a bunch of people that doubt everything. So lets put some facts around this discussion before we start selling FUD in metric tons ;) (note, when the JSConf EU video is released, that joke will make a lot more sense).

1. It has already worked

The goal of PromoteJS is first and foremost to better the documentation visibility and by the sheer viral nature of PromoteJS with a backplane of Twitter and Facebook, it wasn't long before most of the development community knew a couple things.

1. JavaScript documentation visibility is surprisingly horrible
2. There are proper documentation elements out there like the Mozilla Developer Network and such
3. A lot of people believe in better visibility

When I say "a lot" I am being humble, let me put it this way, immediately after the initial launch of promotejs.com, not more than three (3) days time total - the site had over 4.5 million unique visitors and according to Google already had over 20,000 backlinks from people writing about promotejs.com on their site. So what does that mean? Well in simplest terms, this is obviously an issue that needed discussion and a rallying call mind you that even if no one put the badge on their site and backlinked the hell out of PromoteJS, thus giving a substantial amount of authority, we still win. Why? Well the first and highest quality link on the site not going back to google is to the top level Mozilla Developer Network site for JavaScript, as well as the second link, oh and the third link. So any discussion about the success or failure has to account for this before continuing anywhere else, a major factor that all the so called "SEO Experts" have not yet addressed.

2. Haters gonna hate

This is no more certain than the backlash against PromoteJS where as best I can see a total of 2 blog posts were generated by "experts". Posts which mind you are providing highly organic back links to both PromoteJS AND the MDN site, links without the rel="nofollow" or rel="noindex" attributes. So let me start by saying thank you! Most of what I have read in these articles skips the main thrust of the #promotejs and that is getting people to link to proper documentation, to start discussing it, and to build better community awareness about the problem. In essence, the gist of their arguments are similar to mine - link in your articles it has greater weight than any single link or button ever will. That was a core fundamental of the educational component of the talk, #promotejs is just a way of getting people talking about it.

As for the "keyword stuffing" claims, I would contend that they just don't get it. People do not search of "JavaScript", but for specific items like "JavaScript Array Length" or "JS array.length" in order to find the specific target, the alt tag and name tag were crafted based on the actual searches done by actual people actually learning and using the language. Also bear in mind that the whole page and its context, its content, and its backlinkage are taken into account to determine the likelihood of a link being a link farm. So yes, if we had put it on a thousand one of sites each of which with little to no google page rank, I would agree, BUT THATS NOT THE POINT. These are going on high page rank, high value, high content sites that have lengthy histories. If anything this working with google's algorithm, not against. It is people saying I believe this is the best documentation (for now) and if you want to know about JavaScript, like I write about it then go here. 

3. I repeat, it is working!

We built a site to track our progress within the google page ranking across all key terms called Are We First Yet. The site stopped working on March 1, 2011 due to API changes that google made (deprecated the API we were using). What it does show us is that from launch to March 1, we took almost all terms and got them two the first two page results - most above the fold on the first page. We can do even better and we are doing better. I actually wrote this article 3 days after launch, we all the SEO experts were clammering about how this is a flawed or failed effort and how its essentially going to do more damage than good. I ask you now, 5 months later, where are these "experts" with the big bowls of claim chowder? I can promise you this they aren't on the first page of a common Google search, like umm... Learn JS which went from position 54 to link 3 or JS which went from 254 to link 68.

The thing I love most about SEO is that expertise is complete BS. Google changes their algorithm regularly in order to actually teardown the SEO experts and ensure that community determined proper content is placed above otherwise content. The goal of PromoteJS is, agreeably not to create a link farm, but to get us, JS developers, to start linking and start fixing the problems within our community. To take a stand and do instead of sitting and complaining. 

#jsconfeu ftw

This talk was presented at JSConf EU 2010, video is provided, but please also read the transcript. 

We are an interesting lot when you look at the community as a whole. We are a rag tag group of designers, developers, noobs, and elites. We have a sordid history as one of the greatest technological wars played out across our land and left us in a wasteland of stagnation. The big vendors have looted and plundered our community and we survived it, only to come out stronger and better. Many of our original heroes have been lost to legend, or worse they have been scorned by the dragons they sought to slay. We have seen new leaders rise with vigor and innovation not often seen in other programming communities.  We are a community of rejuvenation, of rebuilding, of finding problems and fixing them. We are a community of developers who prefer JS, but use a variety of other languages and tools to accomplish tasks. We are at the point of a renaissance of interest, excitement, and energy and yet I worry. I fear as the drums of war start pounding between browser vendors and the rising tide of interest moves back to JS, what will it do to our community. Will we have built something sustainable or merely yet another flash in the pan technology cult? The new generation of JS, you, me, all of us here, will we learn from our past or are we destined to repeat it in all the wrong ways? Let us not just begin a discussion today, let us trigger action and inspire change! Sustainability should be the most important goal for the technology community at large, and yet no one discusses it. Tonight, we will do more than discuss.

Chapter 1: Education

JS is not a toy language, we believe that otherwise we would not be here. That reality is just now reaching the masses and their first impression of JS is absolutely abysmal. How many of you know what shows up when you search for "JavaScript"? Look at the links that show up, wikipedia? w3schools? Download Java? Maybe you are saying to yourself that "JavaScript" is too broad a topic and no one in their right mind would search by name for the language that they are trying to learn. Well, lets see, "JavaScript Array". The first "quality" link on this page was the MDC documents, link 8 - non-existent. If you want me to take it a step further let's use an actual query for a first time person, google "Learn JavaScript". The first link that actually presents proper JS is John Resig's at position 8 AND its designed for advanced techniques - the stuff in there would blow the minds right out of anyone just starting out. 

This is the first impression of JS by the general masses who are coming to this language and once you see this, you can see why people consider it a "toy language" and understand how so much bad code and disdain can exist for JS. We have hidden the better tutorials, learnings, and documentations away from ourselves AND more to the point, those trying to join the party.  New entrants struggle to learn JS, but eventually just adopt what they know from PHP, Java, Perl, Python and Ruby to a close approximation of runnable code that suffices. Then they publish it back out, proud of what they have done, and continue to perpetuate this plague of improper JS coding. 

We have failed our fellow designers AND developers in this sense. We have made it almost impossible to learn proper JS, a language with both beauty and warts. Some will say it is not our fault, that browser vendors should provide the API documentation for the implementation or that the standards committee should publish and market it. I am calling bullshit on that. I say that it is up to us to invite, welcome, and most importantly properly educate people looking to learn JS. We, the best and brightest of the field, have an obligation to help those who are trying to learn and understand the complexities of the language. We are the ones that benefit from it most, since those now entering the language will be either extending, morphing, or taking over the very projects we are just now starting. Regardless of library, framework, and even language -- if everyone knows how to program proper JS a little better, we all win. Period. 

So I challenge you to put down your library or framework preferences and write about some interesting facet about the JS language. Describe how you find the attributes on an object, what the difference between an object and an array is (and how to tell the two a part), anything and everything. If you seek fame and click traffic, write about the entry level stuff. If you seek respect and deep dialogs, write about the difference between implementations and convey the wisdom of when to favor one method over the other. If writing is too time consuming or your muse escapes you, I am announcing today a new campaign, promotejs.com. The goal of PromoteJS is this, through pirate techniques and guerrilla SEO we can change how search engines present answers to common queries about our language. By driving traffic to the proper documentation, we can change search rankings and ensure that people interested in JS are connected with the proper educational resources. First target for promotejs, unseat w3schools.com for standard new JS developer queries with proper MDN documentation. Yes I am saying that we crowd hack google.

We need to be the voice of education for our community. We need to promote the proper way of doing things, instead of just ignoring those that don't "get it" or watering things down. We need to commit to educating our fellow developers on JS, the language, and in doing so it helps ALL of our frameworks, libraries, meetups, and conferences. promotejs.com is a step in that direction, but by no means the end of the story. The morale of this chapter is, "The more people that learn proper JS, the better the community will be". 

Chapter 2: Love The Pirate! Damn The Privateers!

The technology field has changed tremendously over the last 20 years and unfortunately it has become focused almost entirely on profiteering and fame. We see companies running technology conferences for profit, selling FUD in metric fuck tons, and making zealots out of noobs. Conmen jump from one "hot tech" to the next in order to be the first to sell this week's "new deal". It started with Java and the marketing engine that pushed it into the limelight, shadowing all else, thrived in the .NET ecosphere, and came full circle to the "hackers" with the rise of Rails. The world of software development has seemed to shift from developing to better mankind to a slow, but strong bleeding of developers. This is not the way of sustainable craftsmanship within Computer Science. We must turn this trend back. We, the crowd gathered here and those watching from home, we, the interested, we... JSConf... have a responsibility to ourselves to turn this tide. We are the people who can identify the conmen, the bad actors, the manipulators and we are the ones that have to call them out. Yes, it won't be pretty and yes they will fight, but fuck it - we are pirates. 

From the beginning of JSConf, doing what matters versus doing what makes money has been a core fundamental to all of us involved. We are pirates, we believe deeply in the code that all ships rise with the rising tide and that equality for all makes for a proper ship. We have no problems addressing the issues in our community openly and calling for a change, we must rattle the sabers and shake out those that aren't committed, and we need to do it now. because I fear to tell you - the establishment is at the door again, ready to make money off our work. 

And thus I say, love the pirate, damn the privateers. Privateers for those who don't know, were people that posed as pirates and would pillage other countries or pirate ships at the behest of a monarchy or government. They were little more than hired guns paid to discredit pirates and break up colonies. Pirates have a code, though it may differ from ship to ship, the general principles of honesty and good faith amongst one another was ever present - this was untrue for the privateers. We need to root out those amongst us who are not here for love and challenge, those that present themselves as great, but provide little to no example or reasoning as to how. Show what you have done and let others determine your value, anything else is privateering. Many people think I am someone important in JavaScript, but they have never once  seen or used my code - trust me if they have, they certainly wouldn't think that. We need to pull down the cult of personality that now permeates our world, it is only a device of the privateer. This is true for not just this band of pirates, but for all software developers out there. We must band together and bring sustainability and sanity back to our profession.

In this, I want to openly applaud Rebecca Murphey for challenging those who champion enterprise jQuery without offering solutions or a frank discussioon of the issues. I want to applaud Zed Shaw for speaking out quite vocally on this very issue in both small and large forums. Our profession needs more champions of character and less bullshit.

And so, I make this call to arms, "Love the Pirates, Damn the Privateers!" with the deepest of sincerity. Luckily, we are starting almost a new at this point. There is no more Ajax Experience, there are few, if any publisher-run conferences in JS. Right now, we have a developer driven development community. Think about that for a second, we have the power. We have a shipful of pirates and a wide open sea before us. Adhere to the code! ARRRRR!!

Chapter 3. Sex, Lies, and Comparing Sizes

JS is not the greatest programming language. No programming language is and none can ever be. They are all a close approximation to something the computer can understand. Every programming language has its benefits and its downfalls, we need to get to the point where we realize this and openly admit the negatives along with the positive. We need to stop presenting each new language or framework with zealotous "THIS IS THE BEST EVER" or coming out with rediculous metrics that "benchmark" two things that are not the same or aren't actually benchmarking appropriate use. The world is big enough for all programming languages and frameworks, and to be honest -  the world needs every programming language. Not more than a year ago, if you told someone that JS would be a serious contender in the server market you would have been laughed at, much like if you had said Ruby 10 years. Times change, needs shift, holding a single weapon makes you easy to combat and a horrible pirate. We are not "JavaScripter"s, not pythonistas, not rubyists - we are programmers. We need to improve ourselves in as many programming languages as we can get our minds around, because every language forces you to view the world in a slightly different way. We need to remove the trolls from our world. We need to stop comparing cocksizes - lets be blatantly honest here, we are all geeks. We are not rockstars, we are not ninjas, luckily though, we are all friends.

Confession time: I am not Mr. JSConf. I am not a leader nor all that good of a programmer. On a good night, I can pull together something but it won't win any awards or medals. Before I started JSConf, I was completely unknown, like many speakers at JSConf US and EU. After this, I am going to return back to DC sit at my cubicle and work as hard as I can on my full time job. After that I am going to go home and enjoy the company of my family. I bring this up to make one thing very clear. I am nothing special. I am just like everyone of you, and honestly I don't want to be anything special. This is not false modesty nor self deprecating, this is honesty. And honesty is what we need to be to ourselves and our fellow programmers. I am most worried about this issue above all others I have since discussed. It is pride and selfishness that have turned programming from an art into a cesspool. It has to stop now and we have to be the ones to do it. Why us? Well simply put because we are interesting lot, we come from all different programming languages and educational backgrounds. We have a rare opportunity and the perfect mix of curiousity, intelligence, and experience. We are sitting at an amazing time and we are amazing people - that is why it is up to us to do this.

So let this be the start of something great. We are going to improve our community, we are not going to let it become a ghetto. We are going to do this not for some misguided blind love of a single programming language but because we embrace all programming languages. We have the power and the knowledge to make these changes, to make the programming world a better place and in turn the entire world a better place. We are pirates. We are JSConf!

Thank you. 

I use Apache CouchDB in the implementation of OurParents for holding a lot of our big data. One of the things I run into is a concern for the size of any specific object within the dataset. When you have hundreds of thousands of documents each of which with a lot of weight, finding the "big" objects can be a problem. Luckily, and full thanks to Jan Lehnardt, there is this little gem that leverages the underlying SpiderMonkey system within CouchDB to determine the size of a document based on the number of characters in it. Hope it helps you as much as it helps me:

Map:

As you may know, I, along with my wife, curate the rather successful JSConf which draws attendees from the international stage to present cutting edge JavaScript technology. Without a doubt, it has been our most ambitious project ever and continues to be a constant source of frustration and excitement for us. Being a developer and firm believer in the Open Source movement, I felt it my responsibility to speak up on a variety of issues that are of concern to me. This post will hopefully give you a very real and very raw view into the life of an independent conference organizer. There will undoubtably be a slew of comments about "you could have done X" or "you should have done Y" and those are, in fact, the inspiration for this post. If you don't read any further, read this next line:

Organizing any event of any magnitude takes exponential effort and cost to the resulting "feel" of that event.

This is something I have come to after years of starting small groups and increasingly large events. JSConf, or any conference as best I can tell, is no exception to this rule. I believe in part this is due to the veil that conference organizers (myself included) put up in order to hide the details in an effort to make the event seem perfect - the truth is very often far from. A conference or any event of substantial size is little more than herding cats with nothing but a spoon and a lot of faith that things will work out, despite any specific time instance. That's it - complete and total chaos. If you don't immediately understand what I mean, please continue.

Venue

Possibly the most complex and important decision of every conference is the venue. Trust me, the venue is also the most precarious and hazardous of all decisions related to the success of the conference. When an organizer selects a venue they are implicitly selecting the following items:

• Quality, variety, and costing of the food available
• IT capability for the entire conference
• Room cost and availability
• Total number of attendees
• General feel of the conference
• Location of the event

That is a tremendous amount of fundamental concerns that all must be done prior to even the first thought of the conference. Factor in that no hotel seems to be affected by the ongoing economic troubles suffered by everyone else, or at least that is the front they all put up, and before even setting forth, the organizer begins to question their decision. Think about this, at a technology conference, you are selecting the basis for every major component that makes or breaks the conference (internet, room rates, number, feel, food) roughly 6-8 months in advance with little to no validation that the conference will work or who will show up.

Lodging

Worse still, you are dedicating roughly 55% of your budget to a group that is only contractually required to turn the lights on and unlock the doors. Organizers have little to no protection in venue contracts, but bear all of the risk. If you assume a hotel for "ease of selection", the organizer has to guarantee at their own personal risk a room block, meaning a set of rooms that must be filled by certain number of attendees otherwise you pay for the rooms to be vacant. You have to make the estimate on the size of the room block long before you really even know the numbers of attendees AND you cannot increase the size without going through another round of negotiation with the hotel. So you are stuck trying to fill rooms in a hotel to (normally) within a 5 room night space considered "acceptable" by the hotel. Worse still, the room rate is "offered" with little bearing to the market and little control over any "considerations". Most hotels will offer the organizer a "price lower than any other available", but will sell the rooms on Priceline/Hotwire for at or below the event price. Aside from the organizer or an attendee actually booking a room through such services, the organizer will never find out and therefore can never exercise the contract line item - rendering it completely useless. 

The mere selection of the venue is a precarious clusterfuck as well, if you choose a venue in the city which affords excitement and self-directed activities for the attendees, you can look for a room rate of $200-$500/night for your attendees at first negotiation. That pretty much prohibits anyone from attending except for local people who do not help you on the aforementioned room block issue. Also you have to factor in that the cost of the hotel room directly affects the cost of the conference, since you will most likely be providing a space for your invited speakers (yet to be determined) to stay. Consider a two day (16 speakers) single track conference, the cost of hosting speakers so you can ensure that they are ready and "on-call" normally runs roughly $15,000-$30,000 of the budget. This is also why negotiating the venue is absolutely essential, but it is very stressful, frustrating, and can build a tremendous amount of hostility between the organizer and the venue early on, yielding a less than satisfying relationship on going.

If you hold the conference outside the city, the price does go down to anywhere from $100-$250, but the organizer has to balance the likelihood of someone taking a taxi from the nearest airport to get to your conference, which decreases with every mile out from a major airport. Since you aren't in a major metropolis (possibly in the suburbs) you likely will have to find (or create) things for your attendees to do/see/eat outside of the conference. Or you could just not care - but then the perceived quality of the conference rapidly degrades, because the attendees will just go back to their rooms and complain. So now you are looking at a social budget and the first thing you will consider is the hotel. Hotel parties cost anywhere from $10,000 - $14,000 for a group the size of 150 people, because according to their analysis people will consume $86 worth of food and drink over two hours. Stop for a second a re-read that, you could send everyone to the fanciest of restaurants in the region for that price, but instead you are going to pay that for chicken-on-a-stick and Bud Light. On top of that there is generally a 22%-30% gratuity that must be paid to thank the people cooking and serving the food - regardless of their performance. It is without a doubt, impossible to justify the cost so the organizer will now have to find a new venue for the social events, making it exponentially more complex. 

And then there is food and beverages during the day. Most hotels and venues will not let you bring in outside food, feigning rules of "state law" and "labor restrictions" - all of which is complete hogwash barring two states. So they will provide the organizer with the only option for food, which comes with prices that are outrageous. By outrageous, I mean $26 per person for a "continental breakfast" of day-old pastries and $40 per person for deli sandwiches. So for a given attendee, you are looking at spending anywhere from $50 - $75 per person per day. This amount will be even higher if you attempt accommodate your guests throughout the day with coffee and sodas which can easily range from $28 - $36 per person, per day. So tabulating that out, if you run a conference for 150 people spread over 2 days, you are looking at a base price for accommodating your guests of roughly $34,000 on average. 

So as a conference organizer, just to get started, you require about $50,000 to just secure the base essentials of speakers and food/beverage. So next time you complain about the price of admission to event X or conference Y consider this, in order to break even for an "ok" event in a reasonable place, the bear minimum the conference organizers should charge without expectation of sponsorship is $189 per day per person. That is just covering your attendance and the presence of the speakers for the event. Mind you that is only a one track conference, as you add more tracks the number of "compensated" speakers grows normally at the exchange of paying guests, which directly changes the cost per person per day. Furthermore that number does not cover the cost of speaker travel, which can range anywhere from $300 to $700 per speaker. 

I have been sitting on this post for a while, I do intend on continuing the series, but I wanted to get this out. Seriously, stop bitching about grass roots conferences, if you have an issue with them, then offer to help - it will be gladly accepted. The grass roots, organic conference movement has provided some of the most amazing events in the technology industry, but they are fading because the response is generally one of "OMG I HATE YOU" or "WTF YOU FAILED ON..." instead of looking at what positive things were done. If you think you can do better, I encourage you to go for it. You will have a new appreciation for every other event you attend thereafter.