An Emacs conference | Hacker News Reader

An Emacs conference

emacsconf.herokuapp.com

234 pointsnic-ferrier44 comments

Please make sure to have reasonably high quality a/v records of the presentations.

Hi @gnufs, the idea is to have it done non-profit. So I'll be looking for volunteers to help me out with this aspect. Or I might approach Confreaks since they do a lot of conference filming. But not really sure how they operate...

You might want to contact the debconf video team for advice/help. http://wiki.debconf.org/wiki/Videoteam

I've worked on it before, so you can PM me if you have any questions.

Will do, thank you for the pointer

@BCM43 how do I reach you? I'm @dotemacs on twitter.

msg me at hntmp@riseup.net (which is an alias to my real email address, which I would prefer not to post on HN).

Hi,

I'm one part of http://www.44con.com/ and having run quite a few events in London would be happy to help out where I can. It might be worth at least meeting up for a chat to see what you want to do and bounce a few ideas around. My contact details are on my profile if you'd care to get in touch (as you don't have any on yours and a search for dotemacs on google yields quite a few results!).

Hey iuguy, how cool. Just the other day a read a post on how 44con came to be. Great reading. I'll definitely get in touch with you later today. For now, you can reach me as @dotemacs on twitter. Thanks for the offer & support!

if I may suggest to just:

  - stable, straight facing video
  - clear mic sound with decent loudness

to avoid wasting efforts on a great idea. Some recent lisp conference videos were shot with a weird angle, and the speaker mic was buzzing, rendering the video useless. It can be post-processed but it can also be avoided first hand.

Good luck

ps: since competent people are proposing help, I might be redundant.

agumonkey, everybody is welcome :)

Yes, please! A think a lot of people who won't be able to attend the conference would love to have the videos.

As you probably noticed, video quality of presentations vary greatly. I'm always amazed by the quality of the PyCon recordings: http://pycon.tv I'm speaking as an user; I don't have any affiliation with the PyCon AV team, nor I know anything about recording video.

I understand that you want to run the conference as non-proft, but I'm willing to pay to have good quality videos for this conference since I won't be able to attend, and I assume other people will be willing to pay as well. Maybe you could setup a donation page to raise money to record the videos.

Egads! Just what I have been waiting for!

Emacs really sweet, but I think that, as it is commonly said with Lisps, its problems are largely social, not technological. As such, the community could really use some social solutions.

The site doesn't seem to say anything about where and when, anyone knows?

the organizer says he is collecting interest right now. Once he's gauged the level it will be decided when and where.

Top story on HackerNews probably indicates interest.

Hi @officemonkey, updated the site with the location & time info. Thanks for your support :)

Indeed it does, but I'd love to have input from other emacs related communities (emacs-devel, #emacs@freenode, org-devel, ding etc,) too.

Also, I'd love to see more presentations from active developers about the current situation of Emacs and possible future directions, or even presentations about less-known features or even some how-to-get-involved-propaganda.

I'd love to hear tromey talk about his plans to rebase emacs in CL: http://tromey.com/blog/?p=709

I thought the plan was to rebase in Guile Scheme?

that's just one plan. a lot of emacs people think that's a good plan, a lot of emacs people think that's a bad plan. I'm in the latter camp and prefer CommonLisp. But, hey, whatever works.

I was under the impression that while a lot of people think CL is a better plan, the work is actually under way for Guile (I guess more by the Guile team than the Emacs team). But, I feel like you would know better than I do.

Would this be appropriate for emacs wannabe users like me? I'd love to shave off some years of the learning curve.

Hi @gtrak, why not :) Just make a proposal on the site, see what people say. The idea is for the conference to be shaped by the people, everybody has a say.

I recently put this guide together: http://david.rothlis.net/emacs/howtolearn.html

Its focus is on self-driven discovery by leveraging the Emacs built-in help and source code. Feedback welcome.

Very very nice tutorial.

Careful when you say elisp `if` is a function, it's a `special form` aka different evaluation semantics.

Thanks! After "pretend that if is a function" I do immediately proceed to explain evaluation semantics: "what does it mean by 'if is a special form'? It turns out that if isn’t a regular function." Of course, I am open to suggestions for better wording etc.

That's assuming you were talking about the "cc-mode customization" chapter. If I've called "if" a function anywhere else please let me know! And keep the feedback coming. :-)

My bad I stopped reading too soon. So maybe just using a different verb than 'is' would be enough to avoid confusion. (and yes I was on the cc-mode customization page)

I think that should be the aim for any tool conference, to help new users get a leg up and to help existing users move it forwards. Same for Emacs. The great thing about Emacs is that it's so big and versatile everyone can learn something new all the time.

Would there be space for a hands-on workshop for new users? What would such a workshop cover?

Hey @drothlis, make a proposal on the site about what you'd want to see, others will pitch in no doubt

Funny, the conference isn't even planned, yet it taught me the existence of Ecukes (cucumber for emacs). awesome

I can't make it out to London (if it's happening there) but I'm excited to see how it all turns out!

I still haven't gotten a confirmation email (and I checked my spam folder). Is the site overloaded?

Hey natep, contact me on twitter, I'm @dotemacs and I'll resolve this for you. Thanks

Can you use the email address in my hn profile? Thanks

I reset my password and now I can login, somehow circumventing the missing confirmation email.

Sounds good, and if it's in London even better :) Where do I sign up for updates?

Hi @almost, I haven't gotten that far yet. But I tweet as @dotemacs on Twitter, so that might be a good temporary step.

Also the codebase for the site is here:

https://github.com/dotemacs/emacsconf/

so, maybe somebody can add what they'd like, such as a RSS feed...

I certainly would attend this ... Europe based best for me ... preferably Prague (which is a surprisingly good place for a conference).

A meetup group would be great http://www.meetup.com/create/

This is a fantastic idea! I'm hoping it ends up being held in the bay area.

This is awesome! I'd love it if this happened!

Sounds great.

Want!

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