As a newcomer to Aurelia (though I’ve been following it casually for a couple of years now), I’m interested in any upcoming conferences or other events where Aurelia will be represented with trainings, talks, or other Aurelia-specific sessions. The latest latest information I have found on the site was this blog post from Feb 2016. From that post, it doesn’t sound like anything’s really happened since Blue Spire took direct ownership of the project.
I’ve seen a few training packages and workshops offered by private training orgs; but I’m more interested in the more community-oriented, developer conference-type events, such as those seen on this random list.
Does anyone know of anything planned? Does Blue Spire (or other core contributors) expect to get involved in these in the future?
This is one of the most frustrating aspects of using Aurelia. It has gotten to the point where it is almost embarrassing to say that you use it, because no one has ever heard of it.
There is a conference in Park City, UT in October called Framework Summit. I noticed Aurelia wasn’t being represented, so I emailed the organizers to ask if I could help in any way. I got a response “I’m working on it with Rob. I’ll let you know if there’s anything specific you can do.” That was in March and I haven’t heard anything since and I seen it is still not being represented.
Sadly yes, I really find myself on the defensive when talking about it. When talking to developers who uses React I get the “this guy must be stupid” look.
It’s hard to challenge what they fundamentally believe and React (and VDOM framework) really believe performance is better when benchmarks show they’re not and there is basically no difference. I find the developer (and developer who picks up the app after you) experience much better with Aurelia.
Nothing new here though
I’ll probably end working with something else professionally shortly after being lucky enough with work with Aurelia for a few years.
@djedi Here’s the deal with that conference. They were going to give me a total of 5 minutes in their keynote and wouldn’t guarantee I could have any other presentation slot. Without another presentation, they would not pay travel expenses. So, basically, they were asking me to take unpaid vacation days from work, buy my own plane ticket, pay for my own hotel, etc. just to have a total of 5min to say something at their relatively small conference. Oh, I wouldn’t have to pay for a ticket. I said “no” to that.
In the future, we do plan on running our own Aurelia conference. We’ll probably start with an online conference and I’m hopeful we can make it free since we’ve got decent funding through Open Collective now. We’re also planning how we can make Aurelia much better known in conjunction with vNext.
Ultimately, a lot of these conferences and even certain well-known newsletters related to front-end development are really just React-centric or focused not on real news or awareness but on lining their own pockets. After speaking at lots of conferences all over the world for many years…I’ve lost respect for a lot of the events and the people who run them. The best events are usually the small ones, organized by people who are passionate, rather than those who are trying to make a buck.
Aurelia isn’t backed by Google or Facebook, so it’s likely it will never be the most popular. Who can compete with the marketing and funding of those companies? However, we do think we can be technically superior, easier, faster, better designed, etc. and we’re committed to our community and our principles, regardless of what craziness the rest of the world wants to adopt.
Excellent points. Angular and React are powered and marketed by two of the most powerful and influential digital marketing engines in the world, and it’s obviously in those orgs’ best interest to get as many others as possible to use their own stuff.
It’s pretty disappointing that the Park City conference wouldn’t/couldn’t offer you a solid presentation slot. Aurelia isn’t as popular as some others but there’s no doubt it is equally robust and deserves to have its moment in the spotlight, if only as an “alternative”.
This weekend is another Utah developer conference – UtahJS, which happens to be one of those smaller, passion-driven conferences you were talking about, Rob. It’s not as fancy as some because it doesn’t have those big pocket-lining sponsorships, but I’ll bet they’d be thrilled to get the creator of Aurelia on board for a serious spot next year, if not a genuine keynote. Utah has a massive developer community that would benefit greatly from hearing from you.
That makes sense completely. I was at UtahJS and talked with one of the organizers. He said they didn’t have the budget to bring you out. I said, “Was he asking for a lot?” He said, “No, just travel and accommodations, nothing out of the ordinary. But I polled about 15 people and there didn’t seem to be enough interest.” Ugh! That was frustrating. It is ridiculous they would only give you 5 minutes. You’re right, conferences are becoming a sham and too commercialized. I’m am going to this conference though. I don’t have very high expectations. Our team has a yearly education budget for conferences and I’m sure many of us would love to attend a conference focused on Aurelia.
It will be interesting to see how Aurelia vNext gets marketed and promoted, and if it can somehow overcome the problem of gaining new adopters when perceived lack of users / community is the very reason why someone would choose to go with a more popular alternative.
All great goals. But, sadly, it is often the answers to these questions that have a greater bearing when choosing to invest considerable time learning or adopting a new tech:
How popular is it?
Will knowing this get me a job?
Have my bosses / clients heard of it?
Are there lot of questions / answers on Stack Overflow?
Are there examples online so I can get a non-trivial thing up and running fast?
Do my co-workers / employees want to learn this stuff?
Can I send them on a training course or buy some books?
Are there lots of online articles and tutorials?
Is it well documented (right from the start)?
Is it going to be around for a while?
Is it backed by Facebook / Google / Twitter etc?
Does my IDE support it?
Do the UI toolkit vendors support it (I don’t want to have to write a calendar widget from scratch ever again)?
How do you get customers for a new product when there are few existing users? A hard conundrum to solve. Even harder if you can’t just chuck cash at it.
Produce a killer application that everybody will use. This needs developer friendly tooling and 100% working tutorials/examples as a first step on the journey to success on the world stage. It is essential developers full understand quickly the advantages of Aurelia and if anything does not work out of the box it will never be used. Remember that Facebook/Google do not depend on NodeJS. Facebook uses the LAMP stack that is entirely open source (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP - nobody believed it would ever scale well) and Google uses some open source and in house BigTable database (C++, Spanner, Assembly and Python - how many believed that combination would work so well )
What key factors have contributed to Vue’s success, then? We know it’s not (only) having a great tech. I can’t think of a “killer app” off-hand (correct me if I’m mistaken). It’s not easier than Aurelia, and I’m pretty sure the tooling, docs, and training resources weren’t any better at the point it really took off (although that’s probably changing given its success). Seems to me it still comes down to Marketing…
Aurelia being presented at the dev up conference in St. Louis
I recently submitted an “Introduction to Aurelia” topic for consideration at the annual dev up conference in St. Louis. This conference has thousands of attendees, sponsors and speakers from the region. I have attended every year for over 10 years, but have never been a presenter. https://www.devupconf.org
Fortunately, my topic has been accepted and on Wednesday, October 16th I will give a 60 minute presentation on Aurelia to hopefully a large audience of developers who choose to attend this session.
I’m pumped to be selected as a presenter for this year’s #DevUp2019 conference, October 14th-16th at the Ameristar Casino in St. Louis Missouri. If you are attending, please come to my session on Wednesday, the 16th @2:15pm in the Vision room.
Don’t bow to your corporate masters - Aurelia, SPA framework for the people Eric Edgar Introduction to the Aurelia SPA framework and what sets it apart from Angular (Google) and React (Facebook). Wednesday (10/16) @ 02:15 in Vision
I’ll be wearing my Aurelia t-shirt during the presentation. There will be multiple Aurelia books on display and I will be giving out a few copies of “Practical App Development with Aurelia” by Matthew Duffield. I also have Aurelia stickers to give away. Thanks @EisenbergEffect for all your help.
A couple of years ago you came to London for a 2-day in depth training session, with learningconnexions if I remember correctly.
Would you be open to do this again when V2 releases? It really kick-started me back then, so if the core team would host something similar on V2 release, me and my colleagues would definitely attend.
@arnederuwe We are definitely considering something like that. Would you all be equally interested in an online training? I also hosted a live multi-day online training a few years back. We could do that again.
With Vue, even though it is not backed by a Facebook or Google, we have to acknowledge a couple of drivers to Vue’s success. Massive support from the Chinese community. More importantly, being bundled with the Laravel PHP framework (since version 5.3 of Laravel, I believe) also helped (that is how I first heard about Vue). And Evan also used to work at Google and marketing wise, it makes for good marketing when you can say, “Created by an ex-Googler”
In the end, it all comes down to marketing. For Aurelia 2, I am going to make it my mission to organise training, conferences and numerous events around Aurelia 2. People seem to forget that while Vue 1 had some success, it wasn’t on anyone’s radar really until version 2 of Vue came out.
Sadly, for Aurelia 1, it was all a case of bad timing. We debuted when ES2015 was barely supported, transpilers were in a state of flux (TypeScript was not that popular), Babel had not long rebranded from 6to5, Weback was continually putting out breaking releases, JSPM looked like a sure bet and numerous web specifications were in their infancy (Object.observe, Shadow DOM).
Aurelia tried pushing the envelope and developers were not ready for the futuristic vision of Aurelia. We also made the mistake of debuting Aurelia with no documentation followed by a period of rough turbulence where the documentation was lacking, this I believe really set us back.
The timing is right for Aurelia 2. The front-end landscape has settled, TypeScript is growing in popularity and seems like a safe sane bet. The design of Aurelia 2 means smaller bundles, less issues with tooling, better configurability, better performance, better documentation and more future proof.
That was frustrating. It is ridiculous they would only give you 5 minutes. You’re right, conferences are becoming a sham and too commercialized. I’m am going to this conference though. I don’t have very high expectations. Our team has a yearly education budget for conferences and I’m sure many of us would love to attend a conference focused on Aurelia.