The long table
The twenty minutes after the talks were the actual point. Nobody announced anything, and I think that's just how these end.
There was a thing on the second Tuesday of the month, at a brewery on the east side, that ran for about seven years. Four tables dragged into one long one, two talks of 20 minutes each shouted over the taproom, some pizza paid for by a recruitment agency, and 40-odd people who build websites in this city sitting there afterward not going home.
It didn’t happen in February. It didn’t happen in March either. There was no announcement and there wasn’t a final one, because nobody knows which one is the final one at the time. The group page is still up and the last post on it is from November and says “see you in the new year.”
I’ve been more affected by this than I’d have predicted, and I’ve been trying to work out what it was actually giving me, because it plainly wasn’t the talks.
It was never the talks
Some of them were very good. Most were fine. A few were a person reading their slides about a framework I’d never use.
But I couldn’t tell you what any of them were about now, and I can tell you a dozen conversations I had in the 20 minutes afterward, verbatim, years later.
The one that mattered most was probably in 2015, with a developer from an agency across town, in which we established over about four minutes that both our places deployed by dragging files into an FTP client, that neither of us had a staging server, and that both of us had assumed this was a personal failing.
That was worth more to me than any conference talk I’ve ever seen. Not because it solved anything, but because it turned “I’m doing this badly” into “this is how it’s done around here, and it’s bad, and that’s a different problem with a different solution.”
It turned "I'm doing this badly" into "this is how it's done around here, and that's bad, and that's a different problem."
The outside view
That’s the thing I think a small agency job structurally can’t give you, and it’s why I’d have defended that table to anybody.
If you work somewhere with four developers, your entire sense of what’s normal comes from four people, and those four people all learned it from each other. You have no idea whether your build process is standard or eccentric, whether the way your place writes proposals is generous or exploitative, whether being asked to do that on a weekend is ordinary. There’s no reference class. And without a reference class every problem looks like a personal one, which is convenient for everybody except you.
The blogs don’t fix this, and I say that as someone who learned most of what I know from blogs. What gets written up is the good stuff. Nobody publishes “we still FTP it and there’s a spreadsheet called passwords_final_v2.xlsx.” You read about how it’s supposed to be done and you compare it to how your Tuesday actually goes, and the gap reads as a deficiency in you.
You only find out that everyone’s Tuesday looks like that by standing next to someone holding a paper plate.
Why it went
Several things at once, and I don’t think any one of them is the villain.
It was always one person. It’s always one person. They reserved the tables, chased speakers, ordered the pizza, dealt with the recruiter, turned up early to drag them together, and did it every month for seven years for nothing. That’s a part-time job performed as a favor to a city, and the astonishing thing isn’t that it stopped, it’s that it ran that long.
The sponsorship dried up as the money moved to bigger, ticketed, out-of-town events, which are lovely and cost $300 and a day off work.
And the talks got professional. Somewhere in the middle of the decade there started to be a circuit, with people who speak properly and have a deck they’ve given four times, and that raised the floor a lot and quietly killed the “I’ve never done this before and I’ve got 15 minutes on flexbox” slot. Which was the slot that produced most of the good ones, and the one that got people started.
Being fair about what replaced it
There’s a version of this post that’s a straightforward lament and I don’t think it’s honest, so.
The online version of all this is genuinely more accessible than a taproom at 7 pm on a Tuesday. That table excluded a lot of people and it did it quietly: anyone with children to put to bed, anyone whose commute made it a three-hour round trip, anyone outside the city, anyone whose health makes an evening out expensive in a way it isn’t for me. And it was a brewery, with the social gravity a room built around drinking has, which is a real barrier for more people than the people who choose those venues tend to think about.
A group chat has none of those costs. Someone two hours inland with a young child can be in the conversation at 9 pm in their own house, and that person was never once at that table. I’m not going to pretend that’s a lesser thing.
What I’d say it lacks is accident. In a chat you choose who to talk to and you choose by topic, so you end up among people who already share your interests and roughly your opinions. At a long table you talk to whoever sits down next to you, which is how I ended up in a 20-minute conversation about print stylesheets with someone who does government work and who changed my mind about something I’d been confident about for two years.
Nothing online has ever done that to me. The sorting is too good.
Nothing, so far
Nothing, so far, which is the unsatisfying bit.
I’ve thought about starting one. I’ve got as far as emailing taprooms twice. And then I remember watching what seven years of it did to the person who ran the last one, who was doing it out of generosity and got a slow, unpaid, thankless obligation in return, and I put my phone down.
Maybe the answer is that these things are supposed to have a life and then end, and the mistake is thinking of it as a failure rather than as a run. Seven years is a good run. A few hundred people passed through it and some of them met each other and a couple of them got jobs out of it and at least one of them stopped thinking they were uniquely bad at their job.
Anyway, if you’re the person currently reserving the tables and chasing the speakers, somebody should tell you it’s worth it, so: it’s worth it. And if you stop, that’s allowed too 🥲