I took Disqus out of my blog back in March. I'd been meaning to do that for a while. Disqus had started to feel quite icky. I exported 18 years of comments from Disqus and wrote a little code to include them in my static site generation process. Now I just stick a footer with an e-mail link (and Mastodon thread link, if there is one) on each of my posts on the website and RSS feed. I get few comments, anyway, so I'd rather not subject everyone to all that tracking and ad nonsense.
Oh yeah, I briefly tried to get BBB working in Docker and ran into lots of issues before deciding it was worth just paying for another server instance where I could run it all by itself.
Time-wise, I did Emacs-related things for 36 hours in Sept, 40 hours in Oct, and 52 hours in Nov. That included about an hour a week for Emacs News. To be fair, it's really more like hobby/fun time... :)
Oh, do you mean like the domain name registration? That's also pretty small. I think it was, like, 12 USD, but I don't have the exact cost handy at the moment.
We've been experimenting with sending tokens of appreciation (evil plan: stickers/pins might get other people to talk to speakers about Emacs), but Corwin's treating that as a personal experiment and not including it in the conference budgeting.
And of course, there's a lot of stuff that isn't counted in monetary costs, like the time that speakers put into their talks or the servers that people have shared with us.
But yeah, it's surprising what you can do on a shoestring budget and with casual volunteers. Definitely worth considering if people have been thinking about running their own conference. :)
I dipped into NeovimConf since I like learning from other conferences and other editors. People's workflow videos are always cool. The Emacs community merrily assimilates lots of great ideas from Neovim, and it's great to see ideas flow the other way sometimes. I tuned in last year too, and I particularly liked how they had a number of NeovimConf talks covering other editors like Helix so that people in the NeovimConf community could pick up inspiration. I like the way TJ and ThePrimeagen keep the conversation going through streams throughout the year. Someday the kiddo will let me have more focused talking time so I can try to make more videos and have more conversations. :)
There was an interesting discussion on Reddit after NeovimConf 2024 (https://www.reddit.com/r/neovim/s/TSFc3cVGGV) People were happy about the talks. Some seemed a little frustrated by interruptions from ads, getting off schedule, and a chat that might sometimes get a little distracted by meme potential. EmacsConf is a lot smaller than NeovimConf in terms of viewers - twitchtracker says NeovimConf got 3640 (plus more on YouTube) and we got about 400. We're, like, an order of magnitude smaller. That might be why self-hosting via Icecast is manageable for us. We started automating scheduling a few years ago because I wanted to accept more talks than could comfortably fit in a day, and since I was figuring out that infrastructure close to the conference, I needed something that I could handle by myself without going crazy. Even though my co-organizers are now more familiar with the fallback scripts for manual control, they prefer the automatic schedule. And community is a gift beyond anything I can code. I remember watching the IRC logs scroll past and feeling deeply appreciative of how wonderful and thoughtful people are, even during some of the tougher sessions we've had in the past.
Also we like doing captions and transcripts and putting up the videos as soon as possible. :) Text makes things easier to search and skim, especially from within Emacs. And videos, well, we've got them, we might as well have a little bit of code to publish them right away.
I reached out to teej_dv and ThePrimeagen on X to see if I could learn from their NeovimConf notes or in case any of our notes might be helpful. TJ said they don't really write things down. Makes sense because they're more video people. I hope they'll consider doing a postmortem braindump and maybe even sharing that publicly. I think that would be really cool.
For me, I lean heavily on automation, documentation, and incremental improvements partly because it's fun, partly because it helps me make the most of what little time I can squeeze in between interruptions, and partly because it ripples out and helps other people who often end up paying it forward. Emacs is very well-suited to this, of course. Every time we get to do EmacsConf, I learn even more and build up more tools along the way.
I think Vim and Neovim have a way bigger userbase than Emacs does, and I'm glad to see Neovim talks sharing workflows beyond the usual software development things. I do think there's something wonderful about the multiplicity of things that people use Emacs for, and how we've got this culture of both figuring out how to tailor Emacs to yourself and sharing those ideas with other people. I'd love to see what happens as Neovim and other editors build that critical mass of user configuration and community sharing, when people can figure out something for themselves by cobbling together stuff from other people. I think it's kinda cool how people shift from one editor to another, even. If they bring ideas from Emacs to somewhere else, or they bring ideas from somewhere else back to Emacs, things get better.
I'd love it if NeovimConf could also be a smoothly-running way to get stuff out of people's heads, connect people with other people, and inspire more awesomeness. I'd love it if people could do that sort of stuff with all sorts of other mini-conferences about their interests. Could be fun!
Thanks for sharing your thoughts! I too like to peruse the things that neovimmers are up to as they come up with some pretty neat ideas. There does feel like there is a productive synergy between Emacs and neo/vim.
You know how it is... It's fun to write Emacs Lisp to automate things, smoothen my workflow, reduce the risk of mistakes. 15 minutes here, 5 minutes there... Micro-improvements add up!
This year we got to have a cluster of talks that were about not-entirely-Emacs things, and last year we had one about Lem too (https://emacsconf.org/2023/talks/emacsen/). We've figured out multiple tracks, so we can handle cross-pollinating with other communities while still keeping lots of stuff for people who want to focus on Emacs. Proposals welcome! =)
I use ledger-cli as my double-entry accounting system. It's been really helpful to have an Org file with literate programming blocks for the kinds of reports I regularly run and the TODOs to check various accounts' statements so that I don't have to remember things. =)
