Road to YGLF 2017
You Gotta Love Frontend conference started its way in 2015 and attracted over 600 attendees for two days full of Front-End goodies. In 2016, YGLF happened again, offering an even fancier experience for its participants.
Since its inauguration, YGLF grew to become a community. Being the first large-scale international front-end conference in Israel, the conf attracted developers and speakers from all over the Front-End community, both locally and overseas. The conference marked as a gathering event for fellow devs and it helped in creating the great vibes in and around the talks.
The fact that people enjoyed You Gotta Love Frontend so much, and actually miss it, emphasizes the impact that the conference had on the crowd. Realizing that, was a shot of motivation for us. To know that all that energy that we put in making a conference happen year after year — is not for nothing. We made a dent in the front-end universe.
This year, 2017, it’s going to be YGLF 3.0, and it’s going to be even more demanding to organize. Realizing that YGLF is a living community, raises new considerations for what is needed to make a successful conference again and how to achieve that goal.
In my post from 2015: “How We Created An International Conference In Nine Months” I shared the details of what it took to throw a two-day Front-End conference, from scratch, with such high standards as You Gotta Love Frontend.
We’ve made a way from that first conference in 2015, and we’ve learned our audience, the speakers and the industry.
Here are our guidelines:
- More technical talks, less inspirational talks. Inspiration is always welcome as an outcome of a talk, but it shouldn’t be the main point. These kind of talks are mostly not practical enough, or not methodological enough, for attendees to take with them and implement in their daily jobs. They want to get tools, action items, flows, techniques, etc. so they can make use of what they’ve learnt, the next day.
- Amazing speakers. The way a speaker presents their content is crucial to the success of a talk, of course. That’s why we hand-pick our speakers, from all around the world. In addition, we think it’s crucial to dry-run talks with their speakers to sharpen the script, improve its value and the way it’s presented so the audience sees it in its perfected state.
- Practical talks. Talks must be either jaw-dropping futuristic, or plain relevant technology talks about things attendees use everyday. In both cases, it needs to be 100% practical. Developers appreciate practicality.
- Diverse. We promote people and topics equally. We believe diversity is important in building a strong culture, a strong industry. And, as a fact, diversity is something one need to work on getting, as unfortunately it doesn’t come naturally in our society. Establishing a diverse conference, with diverse people and the topics that they discuss, is one of our main motivations.
- Explain how to do stuff, instead of what can be done. Talks should dive in to how X is being done, rather than what should be done to achieve X. Many challenges are common, and most devs have already heard of the popular solutions. But not all of them have the knowledge of how to implement a certain solution, hence missing the how. Every talk must focus on how to do something.
- Don’t overload content. Content is king and talks should be picked according to their relevance and thoroughness. Filling slots with random talks, or failing to see behind a shallow talk’s hyped title — a big no-no.
- Focus. A conference is a very busy event, with lots of people and lots of things that go on in a limited physical space. Sometimes conferences offer multiple tracks and so the two (or more) tracks are never synchronized with the optimistic schedule. Usually, this distracts attendees. Lack of attention results in lack of satisfaction.
We believe in a one-track conference, or, alternatively, multiple tracks with pre-registration to a specific track. Don’t let your attendees run around the venue looking for the “better” talk to attend, attendees pay for a conference ticket to see only mind-blowing talks. With multiple tracks, they don’t choose what talks to attend, they actually choose the talks they are going to miss (read more: FOMO).
- Fun, but serious. We take our profession seriously, and so our attendees. They might have come to the conference for fun, but talking about things they care about (like tabs vs. spaces, or Async/Await vs Promises), demands seriousness and professionalism.
With Great Community, Comes Great Responsibility
This year, we want to offer an even greater experience to our audience. We want to recapture the intimate feeling of the 2015 event, with the quality of the talks of the 2016 event, and throw a social and professional event for the community.
This year, the ever incredible Bruce Lawson will be joining us as a host. The amazing thing with Bruce is that being social and professional comes so natural to him. Being a speaker in our previous event, and a veteran speaker with talks all around the world, Bruce knows the ins and outs of what makes a conference great. Also, he has that awesome personality :)
We have an obligation to our crowd — we want to enlighten them, to promote conversation among them and push their knowledge to new limits. We want that the time when the conference ends, would mark the beginning of a year full of frontend love.
Stay tuned for more updates as the conference takes shape. It’s going to be a hell of ride.
