Show HN: A tech conference aggregator | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A tech conference aggregator

techconferences.io

99 pointsStriverGuy40 comments

This is great, I can see myself using this.

However, this suffers from being a SPA:

- URLs are not persistent, meaning if I cannot bookmark searches I care about.

- Outbound links are buttons for some reason instead of anchor tags. This means that ctrl-click does not work and will bring directly to the website.

Other things:

- I don't think it's easy to filter conferences which are within an acceptable distance. A map-based search a'la yelp would go a long way here.

Thanks for the feedback! Now that I see some interest, I am going to spend a little time reworking the client side code to make it more user friendly.

What does SPA mean?

Single page app

Those problems can be solved and still be a SPA. just saying :-)

Make the website button open in a new tab, or at least use an <a> element instead of a <button> (you can still use the .btn classes from Bootstrap in <a> elements if you didn't know)

Definitely will switch that up. Thanks!

I think that a filter by technology/subject would be nice too

Date sorting is broken--I'm seeing the following in 'descending' order:

  November 6, 2016
  November 5, 2017
  November 4, 2016
  November 30, 2016
  November 3, 2016
  November 29, 2016

Nice work. Feature request: track CFP dates and let people find conferences with upcoming CFP deadlines.

BTW, you have "USA" and "United States" as two countries, might want to combine those.

Hey, thanks for checking it out. I like the CFP notification idea. Was planning to provide some sort of notification system for the conferences users save. And thanks for catching that, I need to clean the data a little bit.

It's really smooth, I checked to see if it was built in React given the speed.

On the same lines as the comment above, London and London Borough of Camden are listed separately too.

Edit: And you're printing some arrays into the browser console.

Hey, its actually vanilla JS/Bootstrap Table. I need to spend some time cleaning up some console logs and a few other buggy things. Hopefully will push some changes tonight.

V. cool, but would be great to be able to use it as a tool of discovery: list topics covered using tags, and indicate rough # of attendees (I know some people prefer to only attend larger events)

Thanks for including also the Google/Twitter/whatever sign-on. Perfect for reducing friction on trying services.

I'm interested in knowing about upcoming conferences in Europe. So some kind of grouping for the countries (NA, EU, Asia etc) would be useful.

Maybe allow people to search by state (or other regional borders) inside of a given country?

Or sort by distance from a given zip code or city?

Good idea. I tried looking for a tool like this quite recently because I keep missing interesting conferences around me or I find about them when it's already too late. I didn't find anything satisfactory so your tool has potential.

BTW. OAuth Sign In doesn't work in your app - it seems like you need to whitelist your redirect_uris at OAuth providers setup.

Just curious, which sign in provided did you attempt to auth with?

edit: found out the issue. thanks for the heads up. All fixed.

I tried most of them. :) But it seems like you have fixed it already, good job.

Out of curiosity, do you mind sharing what stack you're using?

Its Node/Express/Mongo and just vanilla JS on the client. Tried to keep it as simple as possible!

It would be nice if the start/end date could be a range it seems tied to a specific start date for a conference, rather than any conferences starting after this date

it would be nice to see the fields filter down as other parameters are defined, if i set USA as the country, I should just see cities hosting conferences in the USA

Love how clean and quick it is though

You know what would be useful? Ticket price.

I have this for a portion of the dataset. Will definitely look to add it soon.

Looks similar to: http://lanyrd.com/

Which from what I've heard is sadly more or less dead (requests that require human attention are not processed, long downtimes)

Was acquired by Eventbrite a few years back. If I remember it was only a 1-2 person operation anyway.

Never quite lived up to the potential in my mind (or perhaps there just wasn't a big enough pain / market).

Still I like and respect it. I look at it weekly when I curate the Amsterdam startup digest.

I've tried to use lanyrd in the past and have found its information to be unreliable and also difficult to find what I'm looking for, e.g., "what Ruby conferences in the US are coming up next year worth attending/speaking at?"

Keeping conference information up to date requires continuous attention and it doesn't look like it's been getting much lately.

What counts as a tech conference? I don't see most industry conferences or sub-genres like hacker conferences.

Also, I notice you're dynamically loading content on every page view? Do schedules change every few seconds, or couldn't that be at least page-cached?

Just want to say thanks for all the awesome feedback! I am going to put some time to help make it more useful for everyone. To best stay in touch, sign up on the site if you like and drop me a message. Thanks HN!

Nice site.

I tend to use LWN's conference calendar and CFP calendar for this; this looks like the same thing generalized to a broader set of conferences.

Regular conference goers - what conferences would you recommend if you had to pay for your own tickets?

Normally the smaller stuff. Eg for Python/data science in London there's a meetup.com miniconf that gets hosted in various company offices and you just sign up and turn up and listen to some cool people talk about whatever mad science they've been up to. Good places to find jobs/people too.

I don't know what half of these conferences are. A brief description for each would be helpful.

I see multiple conferences with "Invalid Date" - is that expected?

Sorry about that. Still working on some of the data issues as it is pulled from a ton of third party sources.

How do you get the data?

FYI, You have Texas listed as a country. Cool idea!