Thoughts on running a (software engineering) conference

• Get a good night's sleep the day before the conference. If you're doing a good job you will barely sleep at all for the rest of the conference.

• Naps in hotel lobbies are a great way to spend superfluous lunch hours.

• It sucks to cut off a great speaker because you're running out of time. Try to massage the time limit into them.

• Get everything that needs to be printed finished at least a week before the conference start (unless you possess some deep love of frantic all nighters).

• The time in between talks is not the best opportunity to expose people to your taste in indie electro pop anarcho vegan grindcore. Keep it simple. (D'oh!)

• Competent and responsible people are worth their weight in gold. Knowing someone's got your back is an awesome feeling.

• What comes off as an asshole over email can easily turn out to be shy and extremely busy in person. Mind you, I still think, uh, what Sirius Black once said still applies.

• People have an absolutely astonishing capacity to not respond to emails. This was the most stunning thing I learned while organizing the conference. That was probably naïve of me.

• Emails are informationally porous. No one actually bothers to read them. If there is anything they need to remember, say it within two or three paragraphs.

• Distribute lots of power bars throughout the conference. I learned this at FutureRuby and RubyFringe but completely forgot come D-Day.

• Hotel internet just sucks. It's almost worth selecting a venue on this basis alone.

• Nerds need to be coached into any social event. You have to force them to interact in some way. I occasionally still suffer from nerd-social-paralysis, but it's easy to forget when you've been wired for a week, constantly talking to dozens of people.

• On a related note, students find $7 drinks morally obscene.

• If you're giving away stuff in a raffle, write the damn randomizing script ahead of time.

• Always get your speaker's contact details and travel information beforehand. Due to the efforts of my excellent coworkers, the only time I had to worry was when a speaker checked in a day late.

• The day after the conference can be brutal for some people. You go from being relatively important and receiving dozens of emails a day to a nobody the second the conference is over. After you physically recover, schedule some pleasant evenings with the friends you've been neglecting.