Last week, I represented OEF at the Confoo.ca event in Montreal. Confoo is a regional Open Source conference, focused on Quebec and Canada in general. But there are attendees from the Northeast US, France, and other parts of Europe. The emphasis is strongly on Web development.

Evan at Confoo

Evan at Confoo, wearing his cool OpenClimate T-shirt

It was the first time I’d been to an in-person Open Source conference since going to Wikimania in 2019. I’d been to FWD50 in Ottawa last year, but I hadn’t really represented OEF to the developer community specifically.

My main point of going was to learn how to interact with the Open Source community on behalf of OEF. How do we reach out to contributors? What’s our relationship to other Open Source organizations?

The big benefit for me was that since I live in Montreal, the travel expenses were almost nil. I just had to ride the Metro from my home in the Plateau to the conference venue at the Bonaventure hotel. It took about 15 minutes each way; best conference travel experience ever! And I got to sleep in my own bed.

What’s up with the Web in 2023

Probably the biggest thing I learned from the event is that there’s a lot of innovation going on in Web development. I didn’t expect to be doing a lot of learning at the event, so it was a pleasant surprise to have content that educated me.

The gRPC presentation was well-done and informative. I also liked the NodeJS test runner presentation.

Testing was a big topic of conversation – it continues to be a crucial part of the stack, but also one that requires a lot of attention.

Connecting with developers

In terms of connecting with developers, I had a mixed experience. Obviously, it would have been better to be on stage or give a talk during the conference, but I hadn’t planned ahead that far, so I didn’t have that kind of platform.

Instead, I just talked to people at the event – in the hallways, between presentations, over lunch. (Lunch at Confoo is kind of famous; the Bonaventure Hotel has a great kitchen and the food is fancy and interesting.)

I was surprised by how well our message connected with developers. A lot of people had questions about our projects, and wanted to find out how to contribute. I also gave away a bunch of OEF stickers, which are very cool.

One of my big goals is to optimize the developer experience for contributors to The OpenClimate Network. I was able to get contact info for about 7 developers to do a Zoom call with me and our product owner Greta to go step-by-step through making a contribution to our project. I’m going to start interviews next week; stay tuned for results!

Getting on stage

Confoo.ca has a lightning talk segment late on the last day. I thought it would be worthwhile to get up on stage and talk a little bit about the work we do at OEF and how to get involved.

One important thing for any public talk is to frame the presentation to meet the needs of your audience. Although developers at Confoo.ca might be interested in how we built our project, what our stack is, how we ingest data sets, and so on, I thought it would be more interesting to talk about the needs of developers from their own perspective.

So, I did a slide deck entitled “Seven Things Developers Can Do To Fight Climate Change”. Although contributing to OEF projects appears in the slides, I also talked about other projects that need help, and other ways that devs can be part of The Transition.

I shared the slides on our internal Slack channel, and my colleague Carlos Graffi made them look great!

The lightning talk went off really well. I had quite a few people come ask me after the talk about how to work on climate change projects in Open Source. It was successful enough that I’m proposing it as a full talk at some other Open Source events this year.

The net net

Overall, I had a really good time at Confoo. I learned a lot, and I got to connect with people. The level of engagement ratio versus my level of preparation was extremely high. I’m looking forward to doing more Open Source conference presentations this year.

Birds of a feather

These ducks were in the warm pond at the Bonaventure Hotel. It was -25C on the final day of the conference.