Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mlang23 | Hacker News Reader

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In my experience, conferences are a very nice to have, unique experiences, interesting people. But productivity? No. When it comes to being productive, I get far more done sitting at my desk at home. I totally understand that conferences are a really nice thing to go to for contributors. But its more a sort of compensation for unpaied work. At some point, you are invited to go to a foreign country, and you get a sort of geek-holiday. Thats nice. But I never considered it essential for my contributions.

In fact, my impression actually turned around when the "bring your children" thing started to be normal. I vividly remember a few talks at DebConf where I was not able to follow the speaker because of verbal small children in the talk room. Since then, I really really prefer to listen to talk recordings at home.

> productivity? No. When it comes to being productive, I get far more done sitting at my desk at home.

It depends. For creating production-quality code certainly true.

But for design discussions, feature priotisation etc. an in person meeting often is better. Also such events /can/ lead to interesting results from hacking sessions where people collaboratively spin out ideas and code stuff. That code typically needs cleanup, but can spark ideas. Way home from a conference for me often was the time where I had creative new ideas :)

I always find conferences to be a real boost for productivity personally. You always come out full of ideas and papers to read or implement. The motivation and passion of others can be contaminating as well.

> You always come out full of ideas and papers to read or implement.

is it really what GIMP needs though ?

We don't go to face-to-face meeting for papers. We come for live interaction, major release level decision-making etc. We tried video conferencing a few times. It's fun but hard to organize (timezones), too messy, and time-consuming. So are chats.

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