How we did FrontTalks

How it all began / Idea

In the courtyard was a cold January 2013. Outside the window was somewhere -30. All I wanted was to throw a cup or two of coffee, wrap myself in a rug and sit by the fireplace. But Misha Davydov’s excited look and confidence in the victory did not give long to languish:

- Oleg, have an idea! Let's organize a meeting like MoscowJS, read reports, it will be cool!
- Hmm ... come on!

In the end, we decided that there would be too little content for JS meetings, and they took the whole frontend. This is how the history of FrontTalks, one of the leading frontend-parties of Yekaterinburg, began today.
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Where to meet / Place

It would be possible to choose the Ekaterinburg office of Yandex as a place. But we didn’t want to gather people to talk about Yandex and its projects, we just wanted to gather a cool get-together of frontend developers from all over the city. And then, it remained unclear how much a person would come to us. 20, 30, 50?

Started looking for a room. The parameters were very simple: cheap and cheerful. First of all, it was cheap, because we didn’t have much money - we dropped it ourselves. But angrily in the sense that at least 30 people should have entered. They decided to stop at Gorky Bar. Cozy and inexpensive.

EkbFrontTalks / Title

Went through all imaginable and inconceivable names that would combine frontend and Ekb. The working title was EkbFront, and EFC (Ekaterinburg Frontend Conference) was taken as a fallback. But it was all wrong, the name should be biting and, most importantly, not occupied by anyone. At some point, everyone already agreed on the EFC, but EkbFrontTalks suddenly came up. More precisely, to convey the essence of the idea would be difficult. After all, they started all this in order to talk about the frontend!

With such a name, we started holding meetings, and eventually the Ekb prefix disappeared, just FrontTalks remained.

Site

We made a website following the example of berlinjs.org , receiving a blessing from them . Katya Mokhova, having a little poshamaniv with flowers, made the site warmer, and also drew the juicy and most important button “I will go!”.

So it turned out fronttalks.ru .

How to find speakers? / Content

Since the idea originated in Yandex, immediately there were 3 reports from Yandex’s frontendors — Vasya Aksyonov, Denis Chistyakov and Misha Davydov. We connected our friends from JetStyle, we got another report from Lyosha Ivanov. There are still 2 slots left, we left them before the publication of our event, hoping for requests from outside.

Where to get the audience? / Listeners

Opened the site, trumpeted on social networks and waited. The result stunned us. Literally in the first couple of days, the number of registrations exceeded 50! It became clear that we needed a platform with a larger capacity, so we went to the Freelance Café. On it in the future and stopped.

So we received 107 registrations for the first meeting, 60 people came. It was fantastic! In addition, another 5 applications for reports came, with which we easily closed two slots in the program, putting together some of them at 2 o'clock for 15 minutes each.

How to prepare speakers? / Runs

Before the meeting we decided to listen to each of the speakers. It turned out that the degree of readiness of the speakers was radically different. One of the speakers, for example, came without a presentation, with sheets torn out of the book. Then we decided - we always do runs! For each speaker and several times.

Later they began to practice remote runs for speakers from other cities - we communicate with them via skype. Many experienced speakers themselves often ask us about the runs, because quality preparation for the performance is very important for them.

Hardware, do not let me down!

The day of the meeting has arrived, February 16, 2013. They came to the site early to connect everything, set up the equipment. And then there was the first curiosity: while we were dealing with the connection of equipment, the only wireless microphone was broken. A couple of reports even had to turn on the volume of the voice to maximum, a little later, however, we managed to find a wired microphone. Breathed out.

Also, unfortunately, right before the event, it turned out that the full-time camera will be used for shooting at the university. Video reports in the end filmed efforts Vasi Aksyonov and his mobile phone. It looked something like this:



Since then, we prepare all necessary equipment for events in advance and check it several times.

Success

Despite all the difficulties, after the event we realized that everything worked out. 60 people came, 7 of them came specially from Chelyabinsk, and one came from Izhevsk.

Reviews were only positive:

Thank you guys, finally someone started the frontend movement in our city!

Everything was very cool and tasty.

The idea to set the topics for conversation with reports, and then sit at the tables and continue the conversation, was 100% justified. 2/3 of the hall after the reports remained and continued the discussion.

It was a success.

Second meeting

The most difficult thing after the organization of the first event is to continue to organize it without reducing the level. Throwing a cry at the very beginning, we received a bunch of reviews and applications. But the second event, announced at the first, did not receive any.

It was decided to continue at any cost. At some point we simply, with strong will, rolled out a program of four reports that we had in the pool, and continued to wait for new applications, otherwise there was a risk of losing the wave.

I must say that the reports were more hardcore than the first time, and mainly about JS. Therefore, we expected fewer registrations for the event, but this time they turned out to be very much. 94 people registered. About half came to the event itself.

But this time, not everything went smoothly. The day before the meeting, Maxim Ponomarev, who had driven away many times before, had died at a temperature of under 40. From the bins I got my report from Peter about the promotional pages and read it again. The report in stock is great.

DUMP

Once, Vasily Aksyonov, who was at the forefront of FrontTalks, knocked on Julia Gerasimovich from IT-People and offered to supervise the Frontend section at the DUMP conference. Vasya decided to involve all of us, and now FrontTalks is already organizing a section of one of the largest conferences.

Here we first tried the format of the meeting, which we call “30-10-10”. 30 minutes for each report, after - 10 minutes for questions to the speaker, and another 10 for rest and backstage communication. The format has proven itself. Reports are perceived more easily, no thoughts or questions have a chance to be unspoken, and everyone who desires has time to relax, warm up and drink water. We manage to switch and adjust the equipment and presentations of the speakers without haste. In addition, the time allocated to the questions allows to level the overlays in case someone from the speakers gets out of schedule.

Not without technical overlays. There was only one microphone in the entire hall of our section, so we had to run around the hall, transmitting the microphone from the speaker to the questioner. We deftly beat this moment, joking that this was done on purpose so that the speaker could think what to answer the question. But took note.

By the way, in 2014 we were reinsured about technology, and for good reason - there was no VGA output from the projector in our room, HDMI was not suitable for the length of the stage - in general, I had to tinker with the connection.

Conference with the support of J.Gosti

Next story unfolded rapidly. We talked about the event to our colleagues from Moscow, and they liked it so much that they decided to try out a new Yandex program to help us organize and conduct thematic events - Y.Gosti . Thus, we were able to remove the site and bring eminent speakers. In addition, Yandex was just holding Subbotnik in Yekaterinburg, so it should have been a great conference lasting two days.

A serious and difficult process began - the supervision of speakers and the resolution of everyday issues. It is not enough just to find a speaker, you need to bring him back (buy tickets, book a hotel, dock the visit, organize runs, settle technical details). And, most importantly, to multiply all this by 8. After all, it was so many speakers that we finally got.

Still, this time we had strong support from the event team, they took the lion's share of the organization's efforts. Therefore, everything was ready for the event and it went off with a bang.

Further more / Fifth meeting

Further, we can say we entered the stream. The fifth meeting in 2013, we have not surprised anyone. After watching how Yandex professionals make videotapes, we decided to try to do the same. It turned out to be easy: start a recording of the speaker's monitor screen (for example, on a Mac, this can be done using QuickTime), find a buttonhole to output the speaker’s voice to the camera, launch the speaker itself and shoot. After it remains to mix two videos with some video editing program, we use OpenShot.

We shoot the video in this way at every event and post it on our website fronttalks.ru , as well as on the Vimeo channel.

2014

This year began with preparations for the DUMP. Like last time, we organized a section of frontend-development. They gathered speakers from different parts of the country, and even from Israel, applied the already proven format “30-10-10” and got 8 hours of useful and lively communication.

There were so many requests for speeches that having decided not to deny ourselves pleasure, we did what we hadn’t done so far - organized prepati. And no, this is not the same as after-party, but only before the event. We filled the preparations with interesting and informative reports, with breaks for tea, coffee and conversations. So, the evening before the DUMP was hot, and the spectator, who was most greedy before FrontTalks, got another 3 hours of pleasure, listening to an additional 5 reports and talking to a lot of interesting people before the main DUMP movement began.

New cities / Chelyabinsk

We liked the idea of ​​prepati so much that in May of this year we repeated the experience, but this time we went with him to Chelyabinsk. The organizers of the UWDC conference received us cordially, giving us the opportunity to notify all Chelyabinsk developers about our arrival.

The program was planned to recruit both their and Chelyabinsk speakers. As a result, they received only one application from the Chelyabinsk developer, finished off with two reports from themselves.

Having opened the registration, we didn’t count on the full house - the city was new for us, and there were few reports. The site failed - the meeting took place in a much smaller area than planned, and this was the main “file”. More than 40 people out of 60 registered for prepati, this is a very high percentage for a free event. Some listeners had to huddle at the bar, watching the speakers and their presentations from afar. I was pleased that even such inconveniences did not frighten the people, and each of the three speakers found their audience.

Prepati to the conference - as a whole prelude to the main play. This is a good opportunity to warm up the people before the conference, and also not to disregard those attendees who, for whatever reason, cannot attend the main event.

Future plans

Now we are preparing for the next FrontTalks conference , which will be held on September 19 as part of the Y.Gosti project. We are already actively preparing, and we can already announce the first speakers: this time Vadim Makeev pepelsbey , Dmitry Dudin, Roman Salnikov and Vadim Makishvili will speak. The program is still being formed, and you can send us applications to fronttalks@ya.ru .

And, of course, register and come to our conference!



In the end I would like to thank everyone who participated in the creation FrontTalks: Misha Davydov azproduction , Irina Roeva, Vasili Aksyonov, Denis Chistyakov, Seryoga Gorobtsov, Lesha Ivanov, Natasha Frantseva Masha Kudryashov, Katya Mokhov, Elena Voronina, Julia Gerasimov, Andrey Zharinov, Anton Trushnikov, Gennady Barmakov, Sasha Polonik and all the speakers.



Thank!

Oleg Mokhov and Nastya Shipulina xcopyofsoul , FrontTalks organizers