Betteridge's Law of Headlines
states that any headline ending in a question mark can almost always be answered with "no".
https://summit.meetjs.pl/2026/
But it's how I'm thinking about it here and now. As the last meet.js Summit in that shape and format I'll ever organize. A 1-day conference that in the pre-covid world was so easy to pull off that even the clueless me could do it.
(acknowledgement: it was never just me, it was a team effort, and I was the main organizer of only 3 out of 9 - seems like I take 4 years to recover before I want to organize another one again)
Back when I organized my first two, getting sponsors was a matter of sending 15 emails to get half of them to join.
In 2018 I partnered with a charity for the first time to do the ticket sales. Based on feedback from previous years the main problem with tickets was that they ran out too fast. We had to come up with tricks to prevent selling out in 2h.
Getting a 50% discount on a venue to sit 500 was a matter of asking and mentioning it's for charity.
Coming back after covid I almost cancelled the 2022 one. A month before the event we didn't even sell 200 out of the 500 tickets we had. Turns out that's the new reality.
I think we're witnessing the dawn of the local conference. Not because there's no need for them. People still benefit tremendously from physically getting together with other nerds. It's getting easier for the ones who understand that to go to one of the biggest popular conferences abroad. Meanwhile, the conference budgets at companies are getting cut and the expectations are changing.
So while it's great to band together with some incredible people and organize one last Summit - single track, one day celebration of being together with hundreds of other devs, 15 years into the existence of meet.js - I can already see it changing.
Instead of creating a platform for local speakers to shine, we're trying to create an agenda that will be the most useful for attendees in the new circumstances. (Don't worry, we'll have local speakers and they'll shine)
Instead of announcing it and letting the news spread organically, we're doing social media and marketing (well, not me, I still suck at these)
Instead of doing just talks, we're trying other formats.
This Summit will be special, with the hit of nostalgia and pride in how long it all lasted. I hope to see everyone once again, before we finally wrangle AI or it eats us and our neat programming hobby.
If you've been skipping on events for a while because life or kids or you don't feel like it anymore - this is the one time to break the habit and go. If enough of us do it, it'll be a real reunion.
And that's the biggest expectation that this event is aiming to fulfill. But it's an expectation that's not on the organizers to take care of. So good luck to you I guess.
This post might grow in time. Come back in a few days.
Top comments (1)
Good luck with everything, and see you there!