Last week I’ve been to Budapest to attend Craft Conference. This was first edition, but they started big. One workshop day, two day of talks. 3 tracks, around 25 speakers (just look at the lineup – it’s awesome), few hundred attendees. All that in beautiful Budapest. On the paper it all looks great
In reality… well, it was OK but not great. Many tracks were very low quality. Either not very skilled speakers, or speakers I know they could better, but seems like they didn’t care. Slots for talks were pretty short (around 40 minutes), and this could have ruined few talks – especially that speakers learned about it on place. Also organizers didn’t keep the time very rigorously, what caused that breaks between rooms didn’t sync. You often missed beginning of talk in another room, because previous one in the other ran longer. But the worst thing ever was the sponsors pitch for the beginning. Total mood killer.
But this sounds too harsh, because overall I had awesome time. Organizers managed to gather great crowd of attenddees. We also had big contingent from Poland. Some people I knew very well, other just from twitter and met them IRL for ther first time. It was nice just to hangout around venue, which BTW was very cool. Modern construction from steel and glass componed into some older building. Many places to charge your electronics and WiFi that worked for the most time. Really good choice.
As we talked with friends afterwards – we don’t go to conferences for the talks. That’s why we all very much enjoyed Craft Conference. Will definitely try to put it on my calendar next year.
There were few talks I liked, especially : Evan Czaplicki’s, Greg Youngs’s, Gojko Adzic’s and Stefan Tilkov’s. I also heard that Dan North’s keynote was great too. Thanks to one of the organizers all of them were streamed lived and most of them are available to watch.