Introducing the One-ference: how one Hotjar developer made his own personalized conference

You could mix talks, round-tables, and plenaries from multiple events to create a conference perfectly crafted to your interests.

Well, now that conferences are all online, you can.

And that’s exactly what one intrepid Hotjarian did. His name’s Piotr, he’s a Staff Software Engineer, and he made his very own Dev Conference-for-One (we’re calling it a One-ference). In this article, Piotr tells us how he did it, what he learned, and his personal highlights. He covers:

1. The good things about creating your own conference

2. The bad things about creating your own conference

3. 3 tips for making a conference-for-one

4. 5 recommended talks for devs

Now, take it away, Piotr…

Organizing your own personal conference

For obvious reasons, it was difficult to attend a real conference in 2020.

Most of the conferences I would have wanted to go to all became virtual, but they were either at times that didn’t work for me, or they just didn’t seem interesting enough to attend the whole event.

Additionally, after a full day of work, it’s difficult to spend the full evening in a virtual conference.

So after talking to my Team Lead we decided to try something new: I would prepare a playlist of videos from various conferences, then watch them over two days. I would take the days off, just as I would have if I had gone to a real conference. In other words: fully disconnected from day-to-day work.

Let's start with the good:

The good things about creating your own conference

Go at your own pace

You can speed videos up, or even skip them entirely if they turn out to be of low quality. But be wary of this—you might end up skipping them too often, just because you can. For some people, this part might work better when you're under the constraints of a conference schedule.

Choose your own adventure

You can juggle topics as much and as often as you want. With great freedom comes great responsibility, though: it’s best to know what you want to learn and arrange the playlist around a couple of main topics.

Learn from the experience of others

My intuition was that the more times a video had been watched and the more likes it had, the more likely it was to be good. It sounds obvious, but I wanted to verify it in practice and it did turn out to be true. The opposite was also true (although there are some exceptions), but it didn’t mean the video wasn’t worth watching. I just didn’t feel guilty when skipping it

The bad things about creating your own conference

It’s easy to overload yourself

My playlist had 47 videos at 30-40 minutes each. Obviously, this was too much. I ended up watching 26 talks, which I believe is still too many for only two days. I initially planned my conference for three days, then removed some of the videos to fit within two, but didn’t cut aggressively enough, which made me feel a bit guilty for not getting through them all. Plus, when you add in references from videos that you would like to look at, it’s easy to get completely overwhelmed.

There’s no social part of the conference at all

I’m rather an introvert so never manage to talk to more than 1-2 people during an in-person conference, but having people around me keeps me focused and organized throughout the day(s).

Inconsistent AV quality

Not everyone’s audio setup was good enough for playback. Some videos were choppy, and sometimes the audio quality was so bad it wasn’t a pleasure to listen to the talk at all. But that wasn’t something I could do anything about.

3 tips for making a conference-for-one

1. Don’t be too ambitious about how much you’re going to get through. Just because you missed a real conference (or two), doesn’t mean you have to catch up with everything.

2. Choose a couple of topics and stick to them. For example, I wanted to learn about some real-world usages of CRDTs and Kafka. This makes it easier to create a playlist. Otherwise, I would have ended up with hundreds of videos on my list.

3. Don’t multitask while watching the talks, and remember to take breaks. Take a look at a normal conference’s schedule and plan something similar. (Mini croissants and stale coffee are optional.)

5 recommended talks for devs

1. “Stop Rate Limiting! Capacity Management Done Right”AIMD

2. “Consistency without consensus in production systems”Golang wrappers

3. “CRDTs and the Quest for Distributed Consistency”book on Designing Intensive Applications

4. “Is Kafka a database?”“Achieving Consistency Where Distributed Transactions Have Failed”

5. “Event Sourcing and Stream Processing at Scale”

Extra reading:

• “Transactions: myths, surprises and opportunities”

• “A Tale of Two Asyncs: Open Source Language Design in Rust and Node.js”

• “Extending the Error Budget Model to Security and Feature Freshness”

• “What Breaks Our Systems: A Taxonomy of Black Swans”:

And if you like those, feel free to check out my full playlist.

Go forth and One-ference!

After I shared my story with Hotjar colleagues, we decided to customize a small conference for a small group of us next time—two or three people will arrange the playlist, then all who would find the topics interesting could join, watch, and discuss the talks together. I’m looking forward to trying this idea soon!