I was looking for a good way to give feedback to Atlas Camp this year. I hope it’s alright that I’ll share my thoughts about the event here on the developer community so everyone can openly contribute to it. I’ve been in love with Atlas Camp ever since my first Camp in 2013 in Amsterdam and hope with the community’s feedback you can make it even greater for the upcoming editions.
I think this year’s Atlas Camp was great - to put everything in this plain and simple word.
I wanna share some of the details why:
great content: There was so much going on in the three tracks, that it was hard even to keep track of a small part of it. I counted only eight talks that I was able to visit, due to all the Firepit Sessions and 1-on-1 going on. As a matter of fact I am still going through the talks slides and videos to get some more of the content. The addition of the community into creating the content has added rich information from people who tackle the same challenges as we do.
firepit: I really liked the new format coming to the camp and it spawned some great initial discussions to be continued after the firepit.
1-on-1 / Devhelp live: This is just super helpful and has been for a long time. Keep it going.
size: There was a lot of discussion about size the last year. I think you got it right - there was enough space for everyone enjoying the conference while at the same time not feeling lost in space. Also the number of people didn’t feel overwhelming to me.
Being German I also have to complain, (first world problem) having the firepit sessions running along side three tracks seemed to be a little too much to follow. For me it was a hard decision (and this time I generally opted for the firepit)
I want to say thanks to everyone who made it possible or contributed - I enjoyed it a lot and feel that it was time well spent.
Maybe others want to share their feedback too.
Cheers, Chris
Thanks for the mention @christoffer, and even more so for the public feedback.
It might seem strange, but I’m glad for your complaint, as this is exactly the position we on the content committee wanted people to be in. If it’s an easy choice across content & discussion, then I think that @danielwester and I would have done a poor job of helping shape the agenda to better meet the needs of the community.
That you felt you were missing out means we did well, thank you. What Atlassian did make sure is that all the sessions were recorded (and rapidly uploaded to YouTube), so that you can watch any you missed and hopefully this the developer community forum gives you a way of connecting with the speakers / people in the room, so the conversation can continue afterwards.
I actually received that survey for a second time today, first one has been 2018-09-11 already. I’ve submitted the first one a few days ago, so that’s a bit confusing and I’m now unsure whether I should submit my praise and (very few) criticisms again, possibly contradicting what I said the first time around
Speaking of criticism, I fundamentally dislike the way those surveys prevent going back to a previous page to possibly adjust an answer. Survey questions are never just black and white and sometimes you only understand the specific meaning and scope after reading other related ones down the form (esp. for free-flow text questions), so I’m used to going back and refocusing an answer here and there. I have been able to submit the Atlas Camp survey as is, but I actually stopped answering the Summit survey, because later questions rendered my now non-changeable answers incorrect and I simply do not want to submit inappropriate answers.
Thanks, @christoffer for the feedback. I’m just getting back from PTO after boarding the plane in Barcelona. I felt like we put everything we had into this conference this year and thus I needed 3 weeks to decompress afterward.
It’s great to hear that this year was great. This post makes coming back into work today rewarding.
BTW in the spirit of openness, the events team had a goal to reach a rating of 4.4 out of 5 for our overall content score. We get this score by how you rate the talk in the event app after the talk. We had almost 3000 ratings shared with us for this year’s content. I am excited to share that we blew by that goal and achieved a 4.5 out of 5 for the content this year.
A huge thank you to all the attendees (especially your patience on Thursday with the AV issues), speakers, track leads, firepit participants, events staff, everyone! This was a community/group effort and I am proud of what we were able to deliver together.
