April 2, 2015 at 09:39Technical Lecture Feedback Analysis
Sooner or later, everyone who organizes conferences faces such a situation in feedback:
I’ll tell you how we debugged it and what kind of rake happens when the bearded bespectacled people come to the conference for bearded bespectacled people. And there comes an exorbitant concentration of developers.
Actually, the story is this. We have done Java hardcore conferences several times. The main feature of the program - we decided to throw smoothies, marketing, management, Edge and other things overboard, and leave only the technical part. Because then start-ups come who talk about monetization - and it seems that we are talking about easy money. We are focused on middle and senior developers.
The conferences were successful, because after it turned out that there would be no water, the developers shared information with colleagues.
Last year, there was a desire to assemble a mobile conference in the same way in the spirit of hardcore and only technical reports. There was the first Mobius, just the other day, on Friday, the second will begin.
The first was with our mistakes. And to fix them, we started working back in December.
Firstly, it quickly became clear that it was not enough to attract developers from Oracle, Samsung and other large companies. It seemed to us from the old memory that a large brand attracts listeners - but not so simple. Developers come to listen to what the speaker will tell.
Secondly, our program was not very smooth. There were brilliant reports, they were very weak. I was responsible for the content, and I realized that I needed to change the approach a little. For this, starting in December, I began to just listen to every report before taking a person into the program.
What did the report review look like? They simply contacted a potential speaker on Skype or met in person, and the speaker showed his presentation and told several reviewers (there were sometimes up to 5-6 people) what and how. Among the audience there was always a live developer who was interested in the topic of the report, and in which he really works, that is, understands. For us, the depth of study and the ability to convey all this is important. 5 reports fell off at the stage of “send abstracts” - they simply did not fit into our vision of hardcore. Another 6 left after watching such speeches - alas, either the content is not very well chosen, or the developer is not able to tell. This happens more often than it seems.
For example, there was one cool techie - he came to talk about a cool topic with Scala on Android. We held 4-5 meetings: the material is just golden mountains, but it did not work out to select one topic for the report. It was a pity, because the experience is really good - but they tried for a long time to explain to whom and what it was not in the report, in the end they parted. Alas, it happens that the performance is not yet ready.
Or here Denis Kretov - at the beginning of 2014 came to me, said that he wants to make a report on development on Xamarin and Azure. Well, a new man, you need to meet. I went to his office, he was also very cool in development, showed a good demo. But, alas, he simply could not explain. Therefore, I refused him. It should be noted that he came to St. Petersburg, went to university, and while he was a student, he was forced to work part-time. Now he is the owner of his company. I’m not used to giving up. He asked me for detailed feedback. And I'm glad to try :) Then, during the year, he spoke at three conferences, wrote to me, showed presentations - we discussed them. And Denis shook it all on his mustache. Well, in December 2014, he came to us again with experience and understanding of what and how. I also went through a special training for 16 hours for speakers, where they constantly corrected him and taught him. Will perform on Friday. The day before yesterday there was another run, I now know for sure that I will not be ashamed of him.
Here is what Denis wrote in the response to the training:
Thirdly, yes, we did a special training for the selected speakers. I once attended a free training from Vladimir Brick (actor of the Shelter of the Comedian theater and cinema), and he simply fascinated me with his desire to teach and the depth of the material. As a result, we bought the training for 2 days, gathered 12 speakers (who wanted to learn) and drove everyone out of oratory. Ordinary conference attendees, of course, will not even recognize this, but the quality of reports will improve. And this is important to me already. Fourth
Training
,we had a lot of remarks about the security round table on the last program. The most striking example is that Vladimir Ivanov came and says, they say, why do you have such a light report? Nothing hardcore. Sons in general. Do you want to do normal? Well, I caught him at the word, and now he also speaks on Friday. You can come and troll, and then say that his report is something very light.
Fifth,how to collect. To find people from companies, in general, is easy, but this is if you need comrades who are associated with PR. But specifically pulling out developers is a whole story, and it’s more difficult. They relied on those who were interesting at the first conference, asked all participants who they would advise, personally went to all the development leaders in forums and in near-repository discussions, asked, invited. As it seems to me now, the program is selected very tightly.
At sixth,a dense program always has a big problem - I want to get to two reports at the same time. When in one Android room, in another iOS, and in the third - a game framework, in general, you can decide. But when the reports are not so polar divided, I want to see everything at once. Therefore, we write a video and post it to all participants after the conference. And after another six months, we just open at least half of the reports for free access. Here, by the way, is the past. People look and talk - do you want to tell how it evolved? I am contacting, calling.
From Mobius past
The conference starts tomorrow, tickets for direct participation and remote (broadcast) are still there. Look, and if something goes wrong - honestly, I will refund the money. I did not like it - write to me, I will cry, but I will return the ticket fee and start digging, which was not so.
For now, I will briefly tell you what happened to put together in the program. There are official announcements here , but I would like to go over unofficially, like a council like a human being, which is interesting to anyone.
Block 1.Matvey Malkov from 2GIS talks about jet apps for Android. If he is not the coolest on this topic in Russia, then one of the coolest for sure - few people have such a mobile expertise. Nearby, Anton Keks reads about Chromecast - a “USB flash drive” in HDMI that transmits a signal to and from a computer. Just such a nice geeky report about a piece of iron. And in parallel, Alexei Zinoviev from TAMTEK talks about embedding maps in Android. He knows what problems get out with an increase in the number of users, details of licenses, he wrote the pairing with the backend of such cards, released applications for millions of installations with fast cards.
Block 2.First, a round table on security - topics that will not be on the reports, this is the place where you can fight with an expert. Virtually. You can learn first-hand questions about very topical issues. Nearby, Philip Keks talks about the total coverage of the application with unit tests. I listened with interest, although the topic is a bit not mine, very cool. Parallel SmartTV and Alexander Korshak - shows that writing on TV is easier than it sounds, and will show its commercial cases. He will tell you how to write a product in the evening and test it. There will be a live demo on the device.
Block 3.Mikhail Samarin from Finnish FUTURICE will talk about how difficult it is for developers making applications that come “out of the box” with firmware. He has been doing this for about 9 years. Nearby is Yuri Leonychev about working in a team that has taken on the job of ensuring the interaction of all Yandex applications with a passport. It is clear that few people need a pure Yandexoid central authorization point, the security of user certificates and key transfer, so a report on how to make 80% of this house yourself on the knee with a fairly high level of reliability. Plus a couple of patterns of intercepting traffic from the topical. And in parallel, Victor Korsun from ZEPTOLAB will show what's under the hood of their framework. Here he wrote some details nearby .
From the past Mobius
Block 4.Yuri Buyanov from Odnoklassniki is burning about how to make the development process economical by purely technical means. Nearby, Andrei Belenko from NOWSECURE cuts the truth-womb about security on iOS. He has in his clients Citibank, Lockheed (half of the US defense) and many more interesting offices. And in parallel, another report from Zepta - already about the smooth animation that they parse from the FLA files.
Block 5.Alexander Smirnov will talk about debugging highload applications; if you have many installations - it’s definitely worth listening to. Next to Vladimir Ivanov with examples of how malware can get into your application, which holes are where. They, at Kaspersky Lab, have a commercial product that they sell. And on the report, he talks about how it works and how to do something on your own and customize something like that. And next to iBeacon in payment solutions - Denis shows an interesting feature with demos and a simple application on the framework. In the demo there will be a proximity detector that pulls the ID from the cloud and cockes the screen with the cost.
Block 6.Kirill Bessonov from the bank speaks about analytics: they bring about 90% of customers from their phones, without having to access the bank’s website from the desktop. Since these are their grandmothers, a lot of effort goes to understand what was missing, where there was not enough, where they refused. Poking around is very cool. Consider three frameworks, show the pros and cons. Near Ivan Kinash talk about the security of Android and ARM TrustZone, a lot of good architectural things. In the third room, Sergey Lalov (this is an alternative to Unity) explains and shows about the Corona SDK, he is the propagandist of the Crown himself, but the report will talk about what pros and cons and when to choose which framework.
And the last block number 7.Alexey Rybakov talks about the development for wearable devices. Weak, small, and functionally cropped gadgets. The firmware is different, the developers are different, but you need to squeeze the maximum performance out of each device - this is the general approach. There will be a couple of devices and demos to touch. Near Misha Dudarev about the survival of Android and iOS-applications in an untrusted environment. If anyone does not know, this dude wrote jCardSim, which won one of the most prestigious awards in the Java world of the Duke's Choice Award. He knows a lot about protecting applications from reverse engineering. Will give practical tips on how to protect your application. By the way, on a test run, we had such a strong debate over the content of the Misha report, when Dima Evdokimov fundamentally disagreed with some theses. It was a really exciting test run!
In the expert zone, throughout this whole thing, securityguards drink vodka, sit at tables and talk to everyone. We had a lot of feedback that we needed such a zone for semi-private conversations, so we did see it. It seems that it will be meaner and more fun than you can say on a public report.
I’ll tell you how we debugged it and what kind of rake happens when the bearded bespectacled people come to the conference for bearded bespectacled people. And there comes an exorbitant concentration of developers.
Background
Actually, the story is this. We have done Java hardcore conferences several times. The main feature of the program - we decided to throw smoothies, marketing, management, Edge and other things overboard, and leave only the technical part. Because then start-ups come who talk about monetization - and it seems that we are talking about easy money. We are focused on middle and senior developers.
The conferences were successful, because after it turned out that there would be no water, the developers shared information with colleagues.
Last year, there was a desire to assemble a mobile conference in the same way in the spirit of hardcore and only technical reports. There was the first Mobius, just the other day, on Friday, the second will begin.
The first was with our mistakes. And to fix them, we started working back in December.
What worked, what not
Firstly, it quickly became clear that it was not enough to attract developers from Oracle, Samsung and other large companies. It seemed to us from the old memory that a large brand attracts listeners - but not so simple. Developers come to listen to what the speaker will tell.
Secondly, our program was not very smooth. There were brilliant reports, they were very weak. I was responsible for the content, and I realized that I needed to change the approach a little. For this, starting in December, I began to just listen to every report before taking a person into the program.
What did the report review look like? They simply contacted a potential speaker on Skype or met in person, and the speaker showed his presentation and told several reviewers (there were sometimes up to 5-6 people) what and how. Among the audience there was always a live developer who was interested in the topic of the report, and in which he really works, that is, understands. For us, the depth of study and the ability to convey all this is important. 5 reports fell off at the stage of “send abstracts” - they simply did not fit into our vision of hardcore. Another 6 left after watching such speeches - alas, either the content is not very well chosen, or the developer is not able to tell. This happens more often than it seems.
For example, there was one cool techie - he came to talk about a cool topic with Scala on Android. We held 4-5 meetings: the material is just golden mountains, but it did not work out to select one topic for the report. It was a pity, because the experience is really good - but they tried for a long time to explain to whom and what it was not in the report, in the end they parted. Alas, it happens that the performance is not yet ready.
Or here Denis Kretov - at the beginning of 2014 came to me, said that he wants to make a report on development on Xamarin and Azure. Well, a new man, you need to meet. I went to his office, he was also very cool in development, showed a good demo. But, alas, he simply could not explain. Therefore, I refused him. It should be noted that he came to St. Petersburg, went to university, and while he was a student, he was forced to work part-time. Now he is the owner of his company. I’m not used to giving up. He asked me for detailed feedback. And I'm glad to try :) Then, during the year, he spoke at three conferences, wrote to me, showed presentations - we discussed them. And Denis shook it all on his mustache. Well, in December 2014, he came to us again with experience and understanding of what and how. I also went through a special training for 16 hours for speakers, where they constantly corrected him and taught him. Will perform on Friday. The day before yesterday there was another run, I now know for sure that I will not be ashamed of him.
Here is what Denis wrote in the response to the training:
April 3, I’m going to speak at the Mobius conference with the report “iBeacon in Payment Solutions”. The organizers - great fellows - not only make sure that the topics of the reports are interesting, but also organize free trainings for speakers in order to increase their oratory skills. I was at one of these trainings and I can say that it was great. For 2 days from morning to evening, our group, under the leadership of the leading trainer of the school of oratory, Vladimir Brik, studied and practiced the skills necessary for a successful public speaking. In two days, we made material on blocks in comic performances: how to prepare for a performance, how to start and end a performance, how to stay on stage confidently, how to perform if you are several people on stage. Worked with voice, pose and gestures. Personally, I can confidently say that in two days I had a complete picture in my head of how to conduct presentations, and some techniques allowed me to stay more confident. I plan to demonstrate my knowledge as early as next Friday. See you at Mobius!
Thirdly, yes, we did a special training for the selected speakers. I once attended a free training from Vladimir Brick (actor of the Shelter of the Comedian theater and cinema), and he simply fascinated me with his desire to teach and the depth of the material. As a result, we bought the training for 2 days, gathered 12 speakers (who wanted to learn) and drove everyone out of oratory. Ordinary conference attendees, of course, will not even recognize this, but the quality of reports will improve. And this is important to me already. Fourth
Training
,we had a lot of remarks about the security round table on the last program. The most striking example is that Vladimir Ivanov came and says, they say, why do you have such a light report? Nothing hardcore. Sons in general. Do you want to do normal? Well, I caught him at the word, and now he also speaks on Friday. You can come and troll, and then say that his report is something very light.
Fifth,how to collect. To find people from companies, in general, is easy, but this is if you need comrades who are associated with PR. But specifically pulling out developers is a whole story, and it’s more difficult. They relied on those who were interesting at the first conference, asked all participants who they would advise, personally went to all the development leaders in forums and in near-repository discussions, asked, invited. As it seems to me now, the program is selected very tightly.
At sixth,a dense program always has a big problem - I want to get to two reports at the same time. When in one Android room, in another iOS, and in the third - a game framework, in general, you can decide. But when the reports are not so polar divided, I want to see everything at once. Therefore, we write a video and post it to all participants after the conference. And after another six months, we just open at least half of the reports for free access. Here, by the way, is the past. People look and talk - do you want to tell how it evolved? I am contacting, calling.
From Mobius past
Come visit
The conference starts tomorrow, tickets for direct participation and remote (broadcast) are still there. Look, and if something goes wrong - honestly, I will refund the money. I did not like it - write to me, I will cry, but I will return the ticket fee and start digging, which was not so.
For now, I will briefly tell you what happened to put together in the program. There are official announcements here , but I would like to go over unofficially, like a council like a human being, which is interesting to anyone.
Block 1.Matvey Malkov from 2GIS talks about jet apps for Android. If he is not the coolest on this topic in Russia, then one of the coolest for sure - few people have such a mobile expertise. Nearby, Anton Keks reads about Chromecast - a “USB flash drive” in HDMI that transmits a signal to and from a computer. Just such a nice geeky report about a piece of iron. And in parallel, Alexei Zinoviev from TAMTEK talks about embedding maps in Android. He knows what problems get out with an increase in the number of users, details of licenses, he wrote the pairing with the backend of such cards, released applications for millions of installations with fast cards.
Block 2.First, a round table on security - topics that will not be on the reports, this is the place where you can fight with an expert. Virtually. You can learn first-hand questions about very topical issues. Nearby, Philip Keks talks about the total coverage of the application with unit tests. I listened with interest, although the topic is a bit not mine, very cool. Parallel SmartTV and Alexander Korshak - shows that writing on TV is easier than it sounds, and will show its commercial cases. He will tell you how to write a product in the evening and test it. There will be a live demo on the device.
Block 3.Mikhail Samarin from Finnish FUTURICE will talk about how difficult it is for developers making applications that come “out of the box” with firmware. He has been doing this for about 9 years. Nearby is Yuri Leonychev about working in a team that has taken on the job of ensuring the interaction of all Yandex applications with a passport. It is clear that few people need a pure Yandexoid central authorization point, the security of user certificates and key transfer, so a report on how to make 80% of this house yourself on the knee with a fairly high level of reliability. Plus a couple of patterns of intercepting traffic from the topical. And in parallel, Victor Korsun from ZEPTOLAB will show what's under the hood of their framework. Here he wrote some details nearby .
From the past Mobius
Block 4.Yuri Buyanov from Odnoklassniki is burning about how to make the development process economical by purely technical means. Nearby, Andrei Belenko from NOWSECURE cuts the truth-womb about security on iOS. He has in his clients Citibank, Lockheed (half of the US defense) and many more interesting offices. And in parallel, another report from Zepta - already about the smooth animation that they parse from the FLA files.
Block 5.Alexander Smirnov will talk about debugging highload applications; if you have many installations - it’s definitely worth listening to. Next to Vladimir Ivanov with examples of how malware can get into your application, which holes are where. They, at Kaspersky Lab, have a commercial product that they sell. And on the report, he talks about how it works and how to do something on your own and customize something like that. And next to iBeacon in payment solutions - Denis shows an interesting feature with demos and a simple application on the framework. In the demo there will be a proximity detector that pulls the ID from the cloud and cockes the screen with the cost.
Block 6.Kirill Bessonov from the bank speaks about analytics: they bring about 90% of customers from their phones, without having to access the bank’s website from the desktop. Since these are their grandmothers, a lot of effort goes to understand what was missing, where there was not enough, where they refused. Poking around is very cool. Consider three frameworks, show the pros and cons. Near Ivan Kinash talk about the security of Android and ARM TrustZone, a lot of good architectural things. In the third room, Sergey Lalov (this is an alternative to Unity) explains and shows about the Corona SDK, he is the propagandist of the Crown himself, but the report will talk about what pros and cons and when to choose which framework.
And the last block number 7.Alexey Rybakov talks about the development for wearable devices. Weak, small, and functionally cropped gadgets. The firmware is different, the developers are different, but you need to squeeze the maximum performance out of each device - this is the general approach. There will be a couple of devices and demos to touch. Near Misha Dudarev about the survival of Android and iOS-applications in an untrusted environment. If anyone does not know, this dude wrote jCardSim, which won one of the most prestigious awards in the Java world of the Duke's Choice Award. He knows a lot about protecting applications from reverse engineering. Will give practical tips on how to protect your application. By the way, on a test run, we had such a strong debate over the content of the Misha report, when Dima Evdokimov fundamentally disagreed with some theses. It was a really exciting test run!
In the expert zone, throughout this whole thing, security