Can you clarify what this means?
In my experience it means paying for more audio, video, and venue staff because the existing folks have been on duty all day but the conference organizers don’t want to pay or can’t afford to pay for a) more people or b) overtime
I’ve done a bit of mix engineering and conference organizers are very myopic: why can’t I be as excited about their stuff as they are? They don’t think about what happens when this is your day job and if you don’t bring the hammer down you’ll end up working unpaid overtime every day of every week because every conference thinks they are the hottest most exciting shit since sliced bread.
One can assume Google is able to pay more but made the perfectly reasonable business decision not to. The mystery for me is why you’re blaming it on the union?
Perhaps the venue completely prohibits longer days but every rate sheet I’ve ever seen simply quotes higher prices if you exceed a “normal” conference day length.
(I’m genuinely curious here but also being slightly sensitive: there are certainly abusive unions - Philly conference centers come to mind where you have to pay master electricians to carry tables and chairs into the venue - but it is far more common for people to be cheap-asses & blame the unions)
It's just a factor how we chose to run the event and the content and that is what I was trying to articulate.
FWTW: I don’t see a problem with shorter sessions.
As someone who was invited to attend - I really wished the talks were more low level and technical. I'd really enjoy talks about how things are implemented in Chrome, how the underlying APIs (for PWAs for example) work and so on.
We need to do a better job at audience segmentation because we have ranges from senior dev to student, and CxO's etc and that's roughly why we stay a tad higher level with a lot of case studies.
We might end up with different days or different events for the audiences.
Because of this, I want to say thank you precisely for not giving more lower-level details in your talks.
If there are multiple tracks on the same day, maybe consider a high and low level track?
The only conference I've been to that felt targeted to me was Django Under The Hood, which is billed as very technical talks about the innards of a framework.
Maybe somewhere in that 10 hour someone talks about it, but let me ask about this problem: Google is big, and has many sides, fronts, faces and eyes; what is Chrome, where is Chrome in relation to all the other web-related, web-facing web-targeted things?
Where is Chrome, Polymer, Angular, and Android compared to each other (and the big Google itself)? Should I wait for Angular to adopt the Chrome PWA guidelines? Should I just wait for the Android team to stop developing the native APIs and focus on the WebView and make the whole Android platform more web-compatible? If now, what's Chrome's thoughts on what these other teams/projects/products/faces-of-Google are doing?
We are a big company with many facets and no clear web direction owner and also lots of platforms (android, web, assistant etc). Generally, it's lots of groups working to reach users on the web. Chrome works on what it can work on and tries to influence other teams as best it can.
Angular team has been very supportive of the PWA story, but it wasn't clear in this conference for sure.
For those not at the event, we had a large forum area where we had more Google teams (AMP and Angular) and many other browsers have a space to talk to developers.... But this wasn't clear by just looking at the videos.
I think the big thing for me, is we are not going to say don't do Android. We should be clearer on why things like Trusted Web activities help you deliver web experiences with native though and we can keep being clearer about why we think the web is good and how best to deploy on it.
Usually has to do with remarks on why to bother with native approaches, how PWAs are going to conquer the mobile experience or how doing web is so much better than native.
For the exact wording I would need to go again through the Chrome, Polymer, Angular and PWA talks, so just take it with a grain of salt.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TU8fy8PHAl0
Google accepts that they're going to have competing approaches inside the company, and this even has significant advantages. We all just have to deal with it.
That's why you run several parallel tracks, each with a separate theme. As an example, see Erlang User Conference programme: http://www.erlang-factory.com/euc2017#programme
This way you give people a chance to prepare more specific presentations around a specific theme: tooling, components, apps, deployment, distribution, development, what have you.
There were open complaints on Twitter about the dev summit organizers being sexist.
I won't go into details but multiple female Google employees have voiced their opinions regarding this.
Don't be that guy.
For context, for everyone on the thread. We had a wrap-up video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n69vkYvo9g) of the event that didn't have the MC's included and given they were the face of the event, it was a mistake that we made and we didn't have time to fix and are in the process of rectifying. We also had a dedicated video planned just for the MC's but it takes time to create and put together.
Please do keep sending feedback and thoughts through on how can keep improving.
In terms of session length, I can see that being an issue. We had strict union regulations, and a lot of content to get through and I took the decision for more but shorter length talks that we can expand with textual content after the event.
We also tried to keep the theme for day 1 to everything we've learnt in the last year, so what is the new minimum bar for web experiences, how to load them quickly and how we've done it in the real world with commerce and media experiences and wordpress and pwa.
On day 2 I wanted us to showcase where we think the web could be heading in the next year, specifically with more of a focus on developer experience (devtools etc, polymer, lit etc)
Not saying we hit all those goals, but I do feel pretty happy with the event as a whole.