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360Conferences

Welcome to 2022

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The survival gear is on aisle two. Bladed weapons, aisle five. We hope you are ready for the final entry in the 2020 trilogy.

Hopefully, you’ve read my 2021 write-ups. If not, feel free, or don’t :) The tl;dr; is that I scraped by on conferences, barely. Much thanks to my awesome communities. I had my best year as an author.

So. What do I have planned for 2022?

Well, more of the same, mostly.

Writing-wise. I want to get (at least) four books out.

  • Space Rogues 10: Rogue Enterprises
    • Written, going through revisions before heading to the editor
  • Space Rogues: Rogue Enterprises Book 1
    • Writing, about 1/3 done
  • Grand Human Empire Book 4
    • Not started
  • Expedition Inc. Book 2
    • Not started

I’m going to focus my efforts on balancing and my promotional efforts. I think with more GHE books, I’ll be able to spread things out a bit more and leverage that new backlist. Plus with launching a new entry point into the Space Rogues universe, I hope that brings in new readers.

I’m really excited about launching Rogue Enterprises!

I’ve got a few in-person things booked, and I think that’s it. Unless these already booked things kindle some new love, I don’t think in-person events are worth my time. I don’t care to be known as (Yet another) writer on panels, etc. Depending on the event and the audience, a table might still make sense, but yeah. The jury is out on in-person events.

Conferences.

  • 360|iDev is already on the books (Hotel contracts yo!). It’ll be in-person with a hybrid component.
  • 360|AnDev is almost certainly going to happen. We haven’t locked down the plan yet, but no reason to think it won’t take place in July per usual.
    • I haven’t synced up with Chiu-Ki yet, but 2021 went OK. I’d like to get back to in-person, maybe add a hybrid option.
  • Chicago Roboto is… Probably going to happen. My co-chair is awesome and I think we’ll rock it. I had initially hoped to put it late April, getting it back into it’s spring time frame, instead of late fall. That doesn’t seem realistic with omicron burning through the country.
    • I haven’t synced up with Victoria on this, but I have no reason to think we won’t do it.

One thing I’ve decided with conferences this year is to recognize the realities in the communities I serve. In both, conferences are valuable, but there just isn’t much brand loyalty.

I see much more loyalty in the iOS/Mac community, likely because 360|iDev has such long legs and has been such a big part of a lot of people’s lives and careers. But even so, that only goes so far. For the Android community, it’s much more pronounced.

None of that is said as a complaint, more an admission of something I didn’t want to acknowledge. Acknowledging this fact, I hope, will help me plan the conferences accordingly. I’ll evaluate pricing and what’s offered. Gone are the days (mostly) of attendees being scrappy one and two-man shops with the next awesome game or app idea.

So that’s the gist of my plans for 2022. After 2020 and 2021 I’m not thinking too big or expansive right now. Let’s hope us and our democracy survives the year and then we’ll see.

2021 In Conferences

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I figured this year I’d break up my annual reviews of my various businesses.

2021 was certainly…. better… no… the same… mmm no… Different, yes. Different from 2020 for conferences.

This year, two of my events remained entirely online, while one went hybrid.

A few ‘global’ observations.

Folks were tired of online events. I think the talking heads that keep shouting about online events are here to stay, etc. are wrong. Maybe when we’re able to socialize in the real world daily, online events won’t be looked at like, ‘meh’ but for now. No.

We (the global we) went into 2021 thinking we were nearing the end of the nightmare that was the COVID-19 pandemic. Vaccinations were available, travel (at least in the US) was opening back up again. Then came Delta and the US backslid hard. Summer turned into a mixed bag of ‘like it was’ and ‘not at all like it was’.

Conference season for the most part fell smack in the middle of the muck and people were just left not knowing what to do, how big was the risk, etc.

360|AnDev

The hardest part of 2021 was making these online/in-person/hybrid decisions early in the year. January/February of 2021 was not at all like July 2021.

We decided that since we didn’t know what summer was going to be like, we’d err on the side of keeping things online.

It was the right call. The US was beginning to fall before the Delta variant. Companies that had relaxed travel were beginning to restrict it again. Return to the office plans were all torched.

Attendance was ok, but low. The lowest ever, which sucked but wasn’t as bad given the low overhead of online only.

I’m hoping that’s just folks having (understandably) no interest in more zoom stuff in a year that was supposed to be zoom stuff free but wasn’t.

Overall, 360|AnDev was a success. I can’t thank the attendees and my co-chair, Chiu-Ki enough.

360|iDev

Early in the year, the Hyatt said (paraphrasing), “You’re having an event. How we do it, is open to interpretation, but you are having an event, in our building, in August.”

They floated some non-starters like pushing the dates and splitting the event into days spread out over a few weeks. Obviously, no.

To their credit, despite my contract, the Grand Hyatt’s position was “Do the event. pay for what you use. If you don’t fill the rooms you contracted to fill, oh well.”

We in fact did not fill our hotel room contract. Far from it.

Turn out wise it actually worked ok. We held the event in-person, with an online option.

We sold almost as many in-person tickets as online. The ratio shifted the last week before the conference as the US’s Delta surge was fully underway. Companies revoked travel and entire teams had to switch out to online tickets.

While I woulda loved a few more folks in the rooms, it was probably for the best in that it never felt ‘too much’ and at least that I know of, we weren’t a super spreader event.

People appreciated being able to come in person.

Cost-wise. Hybrid events are tricky. We had to rely on hotel internet, which is expensive, and not awesome. We had to pay for a live streaming service, which wasn’t outrageous but was a budget item. We also had to hire a tech to sit and manage the live stream. Also not outrageous, but a budget item, and one that only scales linearly. If I stream 2 rooms, I need two techs, and probably twice the live streaming bandwidth.

Overall, 360|iDev was a success. I can’t thank the attendees and sponsors enough.

Chicago Roboto (Still online, from Denver)

Another one that was hard to make a call on. Victoria (My Co-chair) and I had to decide not just online or in-person, but April/May like originally planned or later in the year like we did in 2020. We opted to for one more year of fall, and one more (We hope) year online.

I was initially worried that by September, people would be dancing in the streets, and would have zero interest in online events. A few optimistic events tried for in-person stuff mid-late fall (They bailed on those plans and pushed to 2022).

Those worries were for naught. By September Delta was shutting things back down.

Attendance, like 360|AnDev was low. The lowest ever again. After AnDev it made sense. Add in the trauma of not being through the pandemic like we all hoped, and zoom fatigue, it just wasn’t in the cards. Having planned to be online we at least were able to continue on, giving those who participated a chance to see others (albeit online), vs. having to cancel events and reschedule.

Not mad. We still covered the minimal costs involved which was good.

I couldn’t have done it without Victoria, she rocked it. I can’t wait for us to crush 2022 with Chicago Roboto, actually in Chicago :)

That said…

This post was light on facts and figures. Mostly because they’re not even remotely impressive, beyond the simple fact that they got me through the year.

2021, like the year that came before it, will be a year we all look back on, shudder, and say. “We made it through.”

My Not a Hot Take on Basecamp

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A friend shared this.

You should 100% click on it and read the thread. Do it in another tab though, I’m not done here!

Matt’s thread reminded me of something. First, I don’t care for DHH, I never have. He struck me as a white tech bro that thought he could do no wrong, and that his hot takes were printed on gold foil.
But whatever, there’s plenty being written about Basecamp’s implosion, go find it. What this thread reminded me of is an interaction with someone I consider a friend now.

Years ago, 10 or so. An attendee at one of my conferences had an issue. I don’t remember it was, some confusion around something. He wasn’t entirely right, nor was I. We went back and forth over email for an hour one morning of the event. It was getting more and more heated. I’m sure had it continued he’d never come to another of my events again, likely making sure everyone knew how he’d been treated.

I didn’t want to be wrong, I technically wasn’t. I certainly didn’t want him to have the last word.

As I said, this was happening during the conference, I was at the registration desk, he was somewhere in one of the rooms. Something in my head clicked and it occurred to me that I was being dumb. My ego had stepped in and wasn’t letting any other part of me get a word in. I could feel the flush in my cheeks as I typed out angry responsese.

somehow, thankfully, I realized there was no downside to “taking the loss” on this. The customer wasn’t entirely wrong and making him feel whole on the issue cost me nothing beyond being “Wrong”. At the end of the day, who cared? My customer did, but did I? Or was I just reacting to a perceived attack? It was the latter, and it took over an hour to realize that.

During the next break, I tracked him down and apologized. I addressed the issue, we agreed on a resolution. Like that it was done. He was happy his issue was addressed. I was happy that a customer was happy. We’re friends now, he comes to my conferences still all these years later. I know if I need something he’ll do what he can to help, same as I would for him.

I don’t know all of what’s going on at Basecamp, but do know this could all be solved if DHH and Jason took a minute to take their heads out of their asses. To listen to their employees openly without commenting. Without digging in. They’ve built a team of outrageously talented and passionate people. By now they’ve lost a lot of them, and that will continue.

My heart breaks for the Basecamp folks now looking for new opportunities. I’ve talked to enough of them over the years to know they loved what they did and who they did it with (and for).

2020 In Review

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You know, I thought losing TGIF on ABC was a blow. Only getting one season of Firefly seemed like a mortal blow. Enduring the hot mess that is Star Trek: Discovery and Picard has felt like walking pneumonia.

All practice for 2020 (and it’s looking like at least most of 2021). Talk about a shit show. There isn’t much in 2020 that I’m planning to remember, but it did have some bright spots.

This is fairly long so here’s a handy little table of contents

Conferences

Rocking the Home Office for 360|AnDev 2020

On the Conferences front. 2020 was horrible but not as bad as it could have been. Around March I was thinking about what closing up shop would look like, and how I could financially manage that. However, I was lucky enough to be able to pivot all three conferences to online-only. The Grand Hyatt (please book a room there if you come to Denver, they’re awesome) was understanding and didn’t enforce their contract. I know they couldn’t have really, without a lawsuit, but it’s nice that it didn’t even come to that. It was “Of course, we get it. We hope to see you in 2021.” My other venues were even more ok with it as they closed so problem solved on that front, LOL.

All three Conferences were a success. 360|iDev even had the same turnout as last year, while the other two had 40% drop-offs in numbers. Of course, cutting tickets by 50-70% meant that even with a good turnout, income was slashed. The saving grace was that expenses were next to nothing. If there is a silver lining it’s that. While I didn’t get to pay down much debt, I didn’t add to it and didn’t have to dip in again. I focused on keeping the accounts flush vs. paying down debts too aggressively. So far, it’s worked.

A bad part is that a lot of people just tuned out for the year, which is understandable (Some neglected to tell me until pretty close to the event, but oh well, I’m flexible). Others were “Zoomed out” by summer, also understandable. I’m beyond thankful for those who still came out; attendees, speakers, and sponsors. It meant a lot and kept me in business. It was also fun as hell. For each event, I had an awesome group of volunteers helping tackle emcee duties. We had music between sessions, folks were able to still branch off and chat separately either on slack or via our tool that allowed for impromptu breakouts.

It wasn’t all awesome of course. I had to apply for a PPP loan which was helped for sure, especially as things were shutting down and we just didn’t know what the next month, let alone four.. er… eight, would look like. I’m looking forward to applying for forgiveness on that, someday. I also had to apply for the non forgivable EIDL loan, so that sucks, I was hoping to make a dent in the debt we’ve accumulated in the previous years, but instead added to it. But we (so far) have survived. I’ve been able to continue paying myself throughout all of 2020, which at the end of the day is a big win in 2020.

Looking forward, I honestly don’t know what 2021 will look like. I’m hopeful that by July we can start gathering safely in-person. That really all depends on vaccine production/distribution, and people accepting that a vaccine isn’t full of Bill Gates’ nanotrackers or 5G or whatever. Realistically I’m mentally working on one more year of online-events and how to make them even more engaging and fun for folks.

On an entirely personal note. As much as I missed seeing people who have become good friends at the conferences. I loved getting up, working out, and then walking into my office to rock the event. Much less stress (though not without hiccups) than the in-person versions.

Writing (,The Business of)

Luckily the pandemic hasn’t been a huge gut punch to my writing. Well, to my actual writing. To the business of writing….

So as to not bury the lede, you can see above that income from writing rose. Not a lot but upward trending graphs are almost always better than downward. Of course, profit was way down this year. The goal I set for this year was to hit (or break) $36,000 in writing income. Got close, but fell just shy.

In looking over the numbers a few things struck me. 2019 wasn’t very advertising heavy. I don’t know how I did so well without ads honestly, but there it is. Conversely 2020 was a lot of learning about advertising which has a high cost associated with it. I expect my 2021 ad spend to be significantly less. My intent this coming year is to dial in/back my ad spend and focus on releases and building my newsletter subscribers.

In addition to ads 2020 had a lot of new/different expenses, some likely to be one-offs, a membership to 2022 Worldcon for example. Others are new and recurring expenses; editors, audiobook narrators, convention booths, cover art, etc. The more books I get out in a year, the more those costs rack up.

Speaking of Cons

I went into 2020 with the plan of it being my ‘year to be more out in public’ I applied for author alleys and expo halls where I could. Got into several, and of course, everything was canceled. Or rather, most things were canceled. Some went online-only like MileHiCon, which was nice. I was on a panel, and had a waste of money ‘vendor booth’ Others like Starfest, really never canceled, just kind of didn’t happen, then announced 2021 dates. I had/have a booth there.

A bright spot was that I was accepted for a vendor booth at Denver Pop Culture Con for 2021. YAY!! Then they preemptively canceled. I get why, and it was the right decision I’m sure, but still sucks. Their future is uncertain so who knows if there will be a 2022 or not. Starfest (now scheduled around the same time) is likely to follow suit, who knows if they’ll send an email or not. Who knows if they’ll refund my author alley, acknowledge it, etc. shrug.

Cons are something I was really looking forward to exploring more. Dialing in my booth presence and pitch, and meeting other authors, etc. That’s likely on hold until 2022. As much as it was nice that MileHiCon went online, I won’t be paying for “booths” at online events, but will try for panel spots still.

Books

I did have my best launch ever, with “A Guy Walks Into a Bar” so that was nice! I’m hoping to beat that with “Here There Be Monsters” (Have you placed your pre-order?)! I’m hopeful that each new book gets bigger and bigger launches, because, well that’s a good thing, folks are still interested and more are joining them.

I’ve also had some luck with the merch store I set up. I want to push that more both for the merch which isn’t all that profitable but is awesome, and books which I get 100% of the proceeds vs. 50-70% royalty.

It’s my hope that over time direct book sales pick up, as well as other goodies. The more I can divest from Amazon without hurting income, the better. It’s more technical and not for everyone, but it’s nice to sell someone a book directly from here and see them come back for more. The online stores keep authors separate from our readers.

Being “wide”

I’ve written about being “wide” a few times. This year my wide efforts expanded to include audiobooks. I’m really stoked about taking my audiobooks wide, though the downside is coming up with the money to pay for narration in advance, so that’s a new budgeting entry. I’m happy that at least based on sales prior to leaving ACX I’d recouped what I’d have paid directly for Space Rogues 1, and made about half what I’d need for Space Rogues 2. Audio may slow to one release a year, we’ll see.

This year I also moved from being an Amazon Kindle reader to using a Kobo Clara. As such, much of my advertising energy was focused on driving business not just from Amazon, but specifically to Kobo, then Barnes & Noble. That means Facebook ads which are awesome at sucking up your money and delivering nothing. I’ve gotten better over the course of the year with my targeting, but a costly experiment for sure. With Apple’s changes (Very much happy about that) I’m guessing my FB ad spend will diminish further. We’ll see.

Overall I’ve had good luck diversifying myself from Amazon. It’ll be interesting to see how sticky that will be as I try to reduce my expenses a bit in the ad space.

2020’s breakdown is definitely pleasing. I don’t have a hard and fast goal for Amazon’s percentage, but below 50% would be I think the best. What’s especially pleasing is that while I’ve reduced my dependence on Amazon, my income has gone up. Proof you can do it without selling your soul to Jeff Bezos.

Writing (, The Craft Of)

So yeah, the business of writing, at least the in-person/glad-handing part has sucked. The business of actually writing, however, well that’s actually going well. Really well.

I got two Space Rogues books out, plus launched a new series. So a three-book year, which is good. I’m hoping to get to a four release a year schedule; one in each series, plus a wildcard. That’s aggressive, but the plan is for writing to replace conferences as my main source of income. To get to that end, I have to produce and keep the back catalog working for me.

2021 will be a good year for releases;

  • “Here There Be Monsters” (Space Rogues)
  • “Any Job Will Do” (Grand Human Empire)
  • “Side Hustle Tango” (Grand Human Empire)
  • and (I hope) “Airport of Mystery” (Expedition Inc.)
  • Plus a To Be Titled Book 9 in the Space Rogues series.

I’m excited about the launch of the Grand Human Empire series. Not only will I be trying out a launch with a second book already completed and in the pipe, but with a new series, I can start building a more diverse back catalog. I’ve found with Space Rogues that many readers can’t handle the present tense. It breaks their brains somehow, no idea why or how. Their loss. The Grand Human Empire is more traditionally written in the past tense.

It’s Not Always Rosy

I launched ‘Island of Secrets‘ under a pen name and in a new genre. It’s been a struggle to get traction. I’m hoping that a second book will help there, but also plan to invest more of my marketing attention there. I was a bit let down when I released it because I distributed ARCs and got some great potential reviews, but when it came time to actually post them, almost no one did. Out of 17 odd people who signed up to read and review, only 3 delivered. One, who wrote an awesome review in the review portal, never published elsewhere, making it mostly useless. :( Such is life.

Community Stuff

I’m still an active (Though retiring in 2021) member of the Board of Directors for the Colorado Authors League. I’ve been on the board since 2018, initially to manage the Festival of Books. That got squashed, then the Pandemic hit. As much as I like being on the board, I ended up being “The Web Guy” for our new platform (which is powerful but mostly a POS), so I’m leaving that in ’21. I’ll continue my membership because I think it’s good to have some professional memberships.

Speaking of, I also joined the SFWA in March. I don’t find much value outside the name however. I’m hoping that changes, but it seems the group is mostly focused on their traditionally published members and members who are submitting short works to zines. Neither of which are of the slightest interest to me. But like CAL, I think there’s some value in being a member just to have that network.

I’m still on the Organizing Committee for Denver Startup Week, and intend to stick around. This year obviously, we went 100% online. Which was interesting given our normal size and scope. What is already the largest free entrepreneurial event in the world, became the largest online entrepreneurial event in the world. We hosted dozens of panels and talks on zoom, Monday through Friday. Live streaming those to Youtube. It was a bold lift and with only a few hiccups on Monday went off perfectly! We did an amazing thing.

I’m still wrangling the awesome cats that are the Ignite Denver Committee. I miss that group a lot. We held our last in-person Ignite Denver in March, the night before our venue, the Bug Theatre (Please support them if you can) close to events. The group went in our own directions, focusing on ourselves, two of us got married, etc. So we didn’t even put effort into trying an online Ignite Denver. This past summer Kat, Jared, and I hosted a live review show to benefit the Bug and raised $300 for them, it was a blast!

Family

On the family front, Nicole and I are doing fine. I already did my jobs from home, so no major impact there. Nicole was already doing 1-2 days a week at home when she could, and has had remote jobs before, so had an office already set up. So when her job pulled the trigger she was up and running on day one. The dogs already being homeschooled helped too. I feel for my friends with kids.

It feels like 20 years ago, but we went to Africa at the beginning of this year. Nicole climbed Kilimanjaro, I got to celebrate my birthday in Zanzibar with some great friends. I honestly can’t believe that was this year, it feels so long ago.

More recently, we bought a new car, a Rav4 Hybrid. I like it. It was bittersweet to say goodbye to the Audi. We’ve had it for almost 15 years, loving every minute. I still miss the power of the turbo and the manual transmission, but in buying the Rav4 I realize my time a being even a little bit a “Car guy” seems to have passed. It’s just a thing to get me places. The more comfortable the better but I don’t need power, I don’t need that throaty roar. So that’s a thing.

Otherwise we’re hanging in there, trying to support local restaurants and businesses. Seeing the 3-4 people in our bubble of trust once in a while. With Winter here I suspect even our scant trips to local breweries will be greatly reduced, which bums me out.

Cons in the time of COVID

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I’ve now finished all of my 360|Conferences events for the year, and have participated/watched two writer events.

This past weekend I attended my second MileHiCon, overall it was better than my first.

MileHiCon 52 was this past weekend, and October 2-3 was… I’m honestly blanking and all I have are Zoom links in my calendar, shrug.

Anyhow, many events just threw in the towel (Starfest, Rocky mtn Con, 20booksto50k, etc) so it’s nice that a few gave it their best shot to provide the community something to do. Here are some takeaways I gleaned.

Booths

Don’t bother with author alley/vendor areas. Thankfully MileHiCon wasn’t overly expensive, but it was all a waste. Zero sales that I can link to the event. No “came to my table” that I know of.

I saw this with 360|Conferences events as well. Our sponsors (gods bless ’em) didn’t get much traffic. It just doesn’t work the same as in-person.

Assuming 2021 is likely to still be virtual, I won’t be offering booths at 360 Events. I’ll find someting else to offer sponsors that gets them engagement.

panels/sessions

There are a lot of things to not like about online events. Being able to do the laundry, mow the lawn, etc. WHILE watching (or at least listening to) a session is not one of them IMO. I love the freedom that comes with virtual events.

It’s great to not be stuck in a ballroom, etc while still enjoying the amazing content.

As a panelist, it’s certainly nice to be in the comfort of my home office. To have notes, etc available if needed. MileHiCon specifically, it was nice to have a moderator, LOL. I need to work on my getting on panels game as there were several i felt I could have contributed to.

Overall

As an organizer, while I missed going out for drinks with folks, etc. I didn’t miss having to get up early and be at the venue from 7a to 8p. I was able to still work out, do stuff around the house, actually eat lunch, etc.

Also, from an organizer standpoint, the overhead is next to zero. No overpriced internet, food, etc. No swag. That was nice from a budget perspective.

As an attendee those are all negatives to a degree. While I haven’t made a ton of inroads in the writing community yet, being in the room is a must so from the networking perspective, MileHiCon and the other (Still can’t remember the name!) were for not.

So, you know one more feather in 2020’s fuck you cap for sure are events. There are plusses and minuses of on-line vs. in-person, to be sure but in any model things were just… ‘off’

I’m not overly hopeful that 2021 will see many in-person events, but here’s hopin’.

Lessons learned in Online Events

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So 360|AnDev 2020 Online was last week. It went well. Really well.

The biggest compliment was that several people said that while it wasn’t the same as in-person, it still felt very friendly and community-focused. That means a lot to me!

Let’s dive in!

Technology

We used Hopin.to. They’ve more or less become the de-facto platform for online events. Which is a shame, because they’re clearly not event people. The platform is mostly fine, for sure an 80% solution, but where it falters, it falters big.

To get around a few of hopin’s shortcomings, we used Streamyard, which I like a lot. It’s not perfect, but it wasn’t meant for online events, it’s a live streaming platform.

Hopin

The biggest problem we found was the sessions, which are barcamp style in nature. The organizer can create them, put them in the schedule, but they can also be created on the fly by attendees. I like that an attendee can stand up a session, that’s kind of like, “Let’s go to the lobby and talk about your idea.”

Except, sessions don’t show up as viewable, until the minute they’re set to start. If you click into the “sessions” section of the site, and it’s a minute before a session starts, no sessions are visible… WEAK. This is fine for the ones attendees created, but kinda weak if you’re trying to use sessions as your second track.

Overall the sponsor support is pretty weak, but better than most others I found. Thankfully (I guess?) Many sponsors have pulled out of events this year.

Hopin found themselves the big dog and I think weren’t prepared. Their support is lacking, their sales channel is give us all your money or walk away, we don’t want to talk to you.

  • Want to embed their ticketing on your site, can’t.
  • Want to have a second stage (for two tracks)? $12,000/year for Pro.
  • Want to use your own ticketing system and import attendees? Cough up that twelve grand.
  • Want an answer to your support email? Maybe the twelve grand will do it? Without it, you can expect a week or more for a reply, if you get one at all.
  • The Pro thing includes a few other features, none that are worth that price.

[Edited to add]

Hopin provides mostly useless data. I had assumed I’d get views by hour (to sync against the schedule), who went into the ‘sessions’ area. Who visited sponsor booths. NOPE.

Useless Hopin report.
Who cares, right?
Certainly not important…

Honestly, overall Hopin does the barebones job I need it to do, but that’s it. My sponsors certainly aren’t thrilled since I couldn’t even tell them who came to their booth.

Streamyard

Streamyard is a great backstage/TV Studio experience. You can upload overlays, banners, tickers, logos, etc. and add them into your stream at will. This was great for doing sponsor lower/side thirds.

My Co-host and I were both logged in so each of us could mange these aspects, turn speaker streams on, etc. It was very nice.

I found only two things that I didn’t like about Streamyard. The first is just inconvenient; You can upload animated overlays, but the file size limits were, for me impossible to meet. No movie file I created was even close to the max Streamyard can handle. So all my overlays are images that just “pop” in and out of existence, which is not awesome, but not bad. I’d have prefered for them to slide in and out nicely.

The other issue was bigger. They don’t have a way to support pre-recorded conference talks. This is annoying but understandable. Streamyard is a live streaming platform. I’m sure online conferences are a new thing for them (Thanks COVID-19!). Several 360|AnDev speakers recorded their talks so they could answer questions in Slack, or because they were in India and their talk time was 3am.

So… I collected the talks, then opened them locally to stream through streamyard. That worked for 1 or 2 talks, then fell on its face because my home internet was not remotely close to up for the job of streaming video out. Scrambling ensued. My first thought was, “Ok, I can re-encode these recordings to be stream friendlty. Wait no. I’m not technically streaming these. They play in a chrome tab that is screen shared. Damn”

(Insert Golden Girls theme song) I uploaded the remaining files to my friend who has gigabit internet. That saved the day, big time. The day one stream was plagued with trouble. I set up an extra computer in my office to watch the live stream on mute as QA. Day 1 required several refreshes of the browser when the stream would degrade enough that the player stopped. Day 2 did not have those issues. The stream ran nonstop on that machine all day, almost 8 hours.

I suppose it’s an upside, I’ve upgraded my home internet :)

Internet

Picture a venn diagram of three circles. The circles are; your internet, the speaker’s internet and the attendee’s internet. Any one can be a problem, any two can be a disaster.

Pre-recorded talks, remove one circle, but put a heavier load on another.

A lot of the chatter was :

“I lost audio. Refresh fixed it”

“Stream stopped. Refresh fixed it.”

etc.

It’s difficult to troubleshoot to say the least.

Non-Tech, AKA People (Golden Girls Theme plays again)

Have help! Chiu-Ki was my co-host both days and it was a huge help. We split up the schedule so I didn’t have to be ‘on’ all day long. I could grab a bite, check my garden, etc. She had it. That was invaluable! When she went to lunch I was there.

I can’t say enough how important having someone to backstop and take some of the load, is.

I found that it’s both more and less stressful than an in-person event. Less, because the expenses are nil, and you’re at home. More because you have no idea if the speaker is awake, you don’t know if your internet will crap out, or theirs will. Once we got started though, the stress drained away (mostly), and we could have fun.

As I mentioned I offloaded the pre-recorded talks to a friend. Tom signed in to Streamyard as “Videos” There was a little coordination on Slack for “Hit play when I say X” but otherwise he was right there in the studio to see what was going on, etc.

So, next steps?

Well, I’ve upgraded my internet (yay all the other things I do that will benefit). That should be a big win for 360|iDev and Chicago Roboto.

I’ll work with speakers on pre-recording their talks. 360|iDev is two-track, so for better or worse, we have to rely on Hopin’s janky way of doing sessions. So I’ll have to make sure attendees know what to expect there.

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