Why I should leave From the Front
This post will be long (damn long), possibly boring, perhaps serendipitous.
A quick note before starting: I wrote this post before Luca announced he was leaving From The Front, but I knew he was. This post goes out to him and to everyone else involved in making From the Front what it is, and no, I’m not leaving.
Bologna, Netherlands
Everything started 4 years ago; I don’t remember exactly how but I managed to convince my company, a quite well known e-commerce corporate, to send me and two co-workers of mine to a conference, even though the management was pretty skeptical about it.
The funny part is that it was not just a conference, but a conference in Amsterdam; most of our colleagues were making fun of us: “You are obviously going there just for the conference”. wink, wink.
The thing is: we were.
In 2010 Fronteers – one of the most renowned European front end conferences, as we discovered later on – announced Nicholas Zakas speaking.
I used to believe the main difference between front end developers was not in preferring jQuery or vanilla js (could be sass vs less, grunt vs gulp, or whatever you think is the religious war nowadays), but if they grew up admiring more Nicholas Zakas or Paul Irish. Nothing wrong with either of them and possibly they do have lots in common, but still I was feeling that dichotomy back then — and I still I can’t help but think that I was right(ish).
Anyway, Rocco and I had a professional crush on him, we loved his articles and we wanted badly to know him. We spend most of the year fighting js performance issues on IE6, mainly due to the lack of understanding in the business about progressive enhancement, and Nicholas was our hero.
We went there not knowing exactly what to expect. We thought free beer at the pre-party was a good start.
The morning after, Jeremy Keith started his talk about HTML5 and we were sold. Conferences were AMAZING. When Christian Heilmann gave his closing keynote at the end of the second day so many things were changed and so many people had been bothered by a pair of drunk Italians.
I remember I went directly to Peter-Paul Koch, knowing only he was the one behind quirksmode.org, asking him how to kickstart a conference in Italy. He told me that was way easier than it sounded, to start just with a small meetup in a pub and then escalate if there was a good response.
He also wrote a blog post about it later on. To reply to me. On quirksmode.org… Ok, you got it.
If PPK had been our trigger, Jeremy Keith has been our main contributor.
At Fronteers, still drunk-ish, I asked him if he would accept an invite to Italy if we did a front end event and he was open to it.
Then he did, twice, but let’s move in order.
We went back to our company with a new hope: we could actually do way better than we were doing, not just for us or the code but for the business as a whole, we could have made all the things awesome.
Alas, there was a mail in our inbox saying everyone should use the company official background on their desktops, you can easily understand our optimism was already, immediately, dead.
All of us are out of the big bad background-enforcing corporate-bullsh*t company now. It took us 1 to 3 years to figure out it was a professional dead end, too bad for a while it was the only option to work at a certain level in our hometown and we were professionally too young to consider a move, yet (hint: I live in London now, Rocco in Berlin).
That background enforcement was actually a bless, though: we figured out in a couple of hours how to circumvent the restriction (thanks Microsoft for being so loose in securing that kind of sh*t) and that we needed another way to express our passion.
The meetups and the evolution
2010/2011
By mid November, one month and ten days after Fronteers, we brought 50 people in a pub to attend four technical talks.
Diego, a designer and close friend of mine who was by then involved in the project, suggested to brand the events, and the first meetup got to be Frontend Invaders; he created an amazing t-shirt, Marco did the pins. It was only a brief preview of what would happen for the next few years.
We did another meetup in March 2011, Camp Nou Edition, with great contents, but in the context of a wider barcamp event, the KnowCamp and during the organisation we felt we lost control on whole thing, not being able to have our own set up and space.
Which leads us to Back to the Front. The name itself was a way to embrace our will to return to the original goals and spirit (and to 80s references).
As I spoilered you before, Jeremy was the first one to accept joining us, Lea Verou was on board soon after and I still remember Luca’s incredulity when we asked him to join us in the organising team and opened up about our in progress line-up.
The 2 of them were not enough to create a solid line-up (well they were, but we wanted more) and we asked some friend of ours with amazing skills, some of them already prominent in the Italian conferences community, to join and we forced them to speak English. Their response was great (Alberto, Francesco, Matteo and Fabio, thank you again).
Then I got in touch with Pierre Spring, a crazy guy I saw speaking at the JsDay, the Italian Javascript conference which kicked off earlier the same year.
Let’s keep it short: the ticket price was 10 euros as we managed to get a free venue, we sold more than 150 tickets plus roughly 100 free for students and it was great. But.
But we didn’t want to have to deal with free venues anymore, we didn’t really have any control on the quality of anything...
The Era of Conferences
2012/2013
In 2012 we went big. And when I say big I mean BIG: we rented a theatre, Teatro Duse, we had some of the best speaker available, among them PPK and one of our personal heroes Steve Krug. The outcome was INCREDIBLE. And we had Pierre back as Master of Ceremony because we couldn’t think of having a conference without him anymore (and we still can’t).
We had to raise the ticket price to offer a better overall experience, which was scary as hell. We were still a no-profit and the cheapest conference in Europe (full price ticket has never been, in four years, over 160 euros for a two days event), but we had no history and we didn’t know what the response would have been. Moreover we were five fools: it was way bigger than us, we did some awful mistakes (we forgot to provide power strips for the workshops attendees, to name one) but overall no one noticed and thanks to the amazing lineup it was a blast.
After the conference some of us hugged our partners crying for the tension (no exaggeration).
During the months before the event we did fight, we did shout, we did hate each other: it was tense and glorious at the same time.
Some of us put their family and jobs on the line to get it through, again no exaggeration.
2013 was possibly a little easier because we knew the format and what to expect, still, being crazy fools, we couldn’t just stick to the plan and we experimented with the announcements on twitter/facebook. It was a mistake to announce the line-up as a whole upfront: after a while we were out of things to say to keep people attention. Still the conference was a success, and among everyone on stage I have to thank again Bruce Lawson, who agreed to join us last minute, even if his schedule is so f*cking tight, and saved our ass with an amazing talk and stage presence.
And here we come to 2014
(I told you it was a long post)
I’m not gonna speak about From the Front and the temple of DOM because it’s too recent and I’m still too involved: I almost wept a few tears for these posts by Francesco and Sally.
There are a couple of things that are worth mentioning though — and here come the reasons I should leave, I feel this was longer than 10 seasons of How I met your mother!
For the first time this year two guys got in touch with me asking how we started and how to do that themselves in their hometowns. If you link this with Jeremy being back, opening the conference, and Chris Heilmann closing it, you can easily understand why my mind suggests me it’s full circle — reason #1.
Also I do feel this conference is getting to be too personal.
The team has always been unbalanced. Three of us did almost all the work. Without meaning to bash anyone, everyone knows their personal involvement. Even though during the event days everyone works his ass out, during the year Diego is working mainly on designs and ideas, Marco helps here and there, Emanuele (who joined after 2012, where he helped out much more than anyone else, even though he was not in the team yet) helps with translations and newsletters, while Rocco takes care of the whole logistics and I handle speaker and customer care and supported Luca, who used to handle all the rest, which was huge.
His footprint on the team and the events, despite I think he wasn’t willing to leave it, was huge, he always made us strive for the best, he challanged us to get better and better and better.
In 2012 we were a little afraid Luca was getting to be the image of the conference. He was indeed the main contributor by far and most of the event was his credit, but we all (Luca included) thought it was wrong to have From The Front being associated to one person only.
As Luca stepped back a little to avoid it, I stepped up to fill the gaps and this year for the first time I felt like I was in the same spot he was a while ago, and when I received personal thanks for the event I knew it was wrong — reason #2.
On the top of it being in From The Front right now is a sweet spot, my comfort zone and I would really benefit from move on — reason #3.
But I won’t quit, not just yet.
It’s though to find something that gives what From The Front gave me in the last 4 years in terms of friendships, personal and professional development and passion. I can’t just quit, sorry folks.
Also the reason #1, my full circle, gave me a new point of view: for a while we thought we failed the Italian community giving up the meetups, our last one was in early 2012, focusing on the conferences, lately I changed my mind.
The people asking how we did it, made me think we are part of an ecosystem leading other people try to start their own meetups and events, which is not new in Italian programmers community, but unusual among pure front enders.
And to quote myself in my awful spoken English:
Every year we are very tired at the end of it, but every year we gain the passion again.
This post is pretty pointless, overall, sorry about that, but I thought it was worth sharing how is to run a no profit conference having to deal with amazing people, a tight budget (did I mention we get to early September, every single year, with the ghost of facing 7 to 12k of potential debts because we don’t want to raise too much the ticket price?) and a whole bunch of Italian emotional folks.
Even more worth now, with the new team shaping up.
I hope you enjoyed it.
Kudos.
