Why I’m Postponing Abstractions 2018
Realities of conference organizing
It’s time to admit it to myself and acknowledge it for everyone that’s been waiting. Abstractions II is not happening in 2018. Instead, Code & Supply will host Abstractions II in August of 2019 and build it in a way that allows it to operate as an annual event. You can stop reading now if that’s all you came here for. The rest of this article is for me. To explain the decision and help everyone understand what goes into it.
Throughout the past year, I’ve been very public about my focus on trying to make Code & Supply into a career. I love to create this community and events where passionate software people meet and lives are changed. In order to make C&S what it needs to be, however, it has to get my full commitment. To get my full commitment means that it must generate enough revenue that I can stop relying on consulting that takes my attention away from C&S. Part of what can get C&S to that place is large conferences like Abstractions. So, before reading the rest of this article, absorb the knowledge that pushing out Abstractions is a major life decision for me. For attendees, conferences are a fun week, interesting discussions, and lifelong connections. For organizers, conferences are hundreds (thousands?) of hours of blood, sweat, and tears.
So let’s talk about why I decided to postpone.
Attendance expectations in 2018
Several factors contributed to an expectation that 2018 ticket sales would slump.
- Competition of Railsconf
In 2012, I was part of my first conference as both an attendee and an organizer. I was a primary organizer of Steel City Ruby Conference and, from the beginning, our goals included showing off the city of Pittsburgh as a wonderful place we knew it to be. We had the stealth goal of getting our city on the map enough that we could get the attention of Ruby Conf and be its host city.
In 2018, Pittsburgh will host RailsConf. This fulfills our goal and it’s so exciting. That excitement is bittersweet, however. RailsConf coming to town creates significant issues for Abstractions. I am a Ruby programmer so my network skews toward Ruby and thus my conferences tend to attract Ruby programmers. So, while not directly being competition to Abstractions, RailsConf can still negatively impact our ability to draw an audience. People living in Pittsburgh and only able to budget for one of the conferences would face a tough choice. Attendees from out of town coming for Railsconf wouldn’t want to visit the same city twice in the same year, even if it’s one they enjoy. It’d be naive to pretend conferences aren’t an excuse to visit a new place.
- International audience
Abstractions drew an audience from around the world. Fifteen countries were represented. In 2016, something happened to the United States. Certain people may no longer be able to travel into the US for our event and many others wouldn’t want to. In 2017, I heard “the conference looks great. Too bad it’s in America. Don’t want to visit there now” about our ops conference Uptime. Not only does this negatively impact attendance but it also impacts the program we can create. We had great international speakers at our first Abstractions and to be limited to US speakers would lower the quality and diversity of our event.
- Date availability
At the scale of Abstractions, there just aren’t a lot of venues to choose from. We have to hope that, of the few venues that fit 1,500–2,000 attendees, we can find one that is available for dates that we like. In 2018, that just simply wasn’t the case. The dates available to us were either to close to a holiday, overlapping with a competing conference, or right at the height of vacation season.
- Twitter advertising problems
Twitter, a platform that has enabled us to make an name for ourselves and reach a broad audience, has changed on several fronts. First, due to the intensity of the 2016 US election, many software professionals have left Twitter. The ones that have stayed have changed how they use the platform. The focus is on activism and not conferences.
Twitter has also forced more and more algorithms on its users. Having users get a curated feed of what Twitter thinks they will like. When feeds were chronological, newer entities could make an impact by having personality or reaching out to the right people. Now, small and new accounts are shoved into a dark corner.
Even ignoring that the essence of Twitter has changed, I’m still left with the problem that advertising has gotten a lot harder. The tactics that have proven successful in the past fail. I’ve seen my campaigns falter as Twitter serves my ads to bots or an irrelevant audience that follow and eat through my paid advertising budget.
Even with strong ad targeting, it’s become a lot less effective in 2017. Something is broken with small business advertising at Twitter. The market is moving to a place where small organizations like Code & Supply are no longer able to compete for attention as well as the established mega corporations with large budgets. I’ve adjusted my strategies to deal with these new realities, but it’s still not as powerful as it used to be. When the time comes, Code & Supply is going to need your help spreading the word. Share our links in your Slacks, share them at work, and tell your local developer communities.
Commitment to big money
With these potential attendance drains, Abstractions II could have had a difficult time reaching attendance numbers similar to our first year. That might not seem like a big deal, but it is when you look at how conferences happen.
In order to book a venue the size of a convention center, Code & Supply works with the local tourism and exhibition committees on customized deals with the convention center and a partner hotel. The moment a contract is agreed to, C&S — and by extension myself — is obligated to a debt of at least $46,110 and potentially up to $147,552. This is the amount of revenue that we agree we will send the hotel’s way through our attendees booking rooms. If we miss these marks or are forced to cancel, it could ruin me financially for the rest of my life.
Need more time
In order to do Abstractions II well, it needs more time. Dragging my feet hoping for a venue and date block to fall into my lap left me in November without knowing if a conference would happen in 2018. The first Abstractions was nearly two years of work on my part and eight months from a team of part time organizers. Starting to plan an August 2018 conference in December of 2017 would lead to an event that doesn’t meet our standards. It’s not enough time.
Personal Stress
The first draft of this article omitted this section. While re-reading the draft, I realized that I focused a lot on the consequences from a logistics standpoint but not from an emotional standpoint. Facing the stressors of producing an event of this size and with these large contracts takes a physical toll. Anxiety, weight gain, heart stress, poor diet, sleepless nights and more come with this when the entire process filters through one person. This punishment happened leading up to an event that eventually was a success. It would only be worse doing the same thing with less than optimal conditions.
I hope this helps you understand why Abstractions II won’t happen in 2018. Conference planning is a serious endeavor that comes with a lot of personal risk. There was just too much working against us holding an event like this in 2018. That put me in a major place of personal risk and the result wouldn’t live up to my standards. Some of the problems of 2018 aren’t disappearing but with more time, they can be surmounted. Abstractions will be back in 2019 and I will spend every possible moment from now until August 2019 making the best damn conference I can.
