Mischief Managed

As of a few minutes ago, NE Scala 2020 wrapped up. There's still some cleanup to do (Ryan and the NYC crew still have 200 t-shirts to mail out), but we seem to have survived the experience. Moreover, it turned out to be a solidly good conference despite the travails of moving all-online at the last minute.

Ryan, the con chair (who did the lion's share of the work) has put together a good debrief here -- I commend it to anyone facing similar challenges. It's a useful proof of concept for folks to learn from.

We were helped by being able to throw some money at it: while we likely aren't going to get full refunds from all of the vendors (some of whom are suddenly facing a bad year), many were willing to give at least some of our money back; in some cases, all of it. So we could afford to, for instance, suddenly set up a reasonably serious Zoom plan for our needs.

We lost some of the social aspect, unsurprisingly -- it's hard for online to substitute for breaking bread in person. But having several Zoom "rooms" open during and after-hours meant that folks could socialize in a reasonably unstructured way, making up for some of that. We also encouraged chatter on Slack, with just a little bit of structure, which also helped.

We've had a focus on Diversity for the past couple of years, and that's starting to pay off, especially on Day Two: we had six women on "stage" across eleven sessions, which is way better than most conferences and starting to look halfway reasonable. We also had a presentation on prejudice and bias on Day One (the Typelevel Summit), and a roundtable on "Bringing Scala to a Diverse Group of Students" on Day Two (NE Scala proper), so the topic itself was given some appropriate focus. It's great to feel like the conference is being a positive force in the industry, in its small way.

And as always, the technical content was excellent -- a wide variety of talks about Scala-related topics, some of them really fun. I'll particularly call out "Functional Error Handling with Cats", which managed to discuss error management in terms of a fairy tale, and "Comonads and the Game of Life", for introducing the wonderful term "Copoetics". I think all of us learned a good deal. Many of the slides can be found at https://nescala.io/#schedule-day-1 and we'll post recordings as soon as they're ready.

Overall, I think it was a solid success: more fun than many events manage, and still one of the highest-quality tech conferences around, despite the challenging circumstances. Questions welcome, if folks are trying to navigate these waters for other gatherings...

ETA: Here's the writeup over on my professional blog.