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Show HN: I built a database of tech conferences to know what to attend to next

by cezarfloroiu on 7/24/17, 7:31 PM with 89 comments

• by meesterdude on 7/25/17, 3:26 AM

  Well done! this is one of the best "Show HN" posts I've seen. Solving a simple & actual problem, and not needing to specify what language or framework you used as justification for it. I really wish more posts were like this.

  I wish I could click a keyword in a conference list and then see more conferences with that keyword.

  Also, the top date menu is confusing for me. I actually thought for a while the 18 was for Day of month, not year. But at least year makes more sense than some ranges that would end mid-month.

  I tinkered and came up with two alternatives (I like the bottom one more) http://i.imgur.com/P0sz1aA.png

  Keep up the great work!

• by raymondgh on 7/24/17, 9:17 PM

  I've seen event aggregators come and go. Usually they die off when the maintainer gets bored of the events. Anything different planned here?

• by saurik on 7/24/17, 10:12 PM

  How is this different from http://lanyrd.com/?

• by fuzzygroup on 7/25/17, 10:14 AM

  If you're looking for additional sources of events, you could try adding the events from http://techmeme.com/. They have a sidebar which is always current. They also have: http://www.techmeme.com/events which would add a lot of flow.

• by ghgr on 7/25/17, 6:39 AM

  The "Where" filter doesn't seem to work:

  Where: Germany "We couldn't find any results. Select other filters, or let us know if we miss a conference."

  Where: Cologne, Germany "Pirate Summit - Cologne, GermanySep 6 - 7"

• by hamax on 7/24/17, 11:13 PM

  This will sound like a strange suggestion, but think about collecting people's emails and sending out an email every quoter or so with a list of conferences. Of all the newsletters I wouldn't mind this one at all.

• by prawn on 7/25/17, 12:46 AM

  Just some design thoughts that you could consider:

  I think you could better separate the actionable filter items from the branding parts. So, in a thin top tier, have your brand top left, "Find conferences near you" in the middle, and perhaps "Add a conference" top right. This will give you more room to fit conferences on screen - at the moment it's a bit sparse - 500px before I get to the listing itself.

  Then you can have the filters and search boxes in their own area and have more room to make it really obvious that their use impacts the list below without the line "Know a conference..." in between.

  You could consider updating "Upcoming conferences" with info pertaining to the search. e.g., "Conferences in Jul-Sep 2018".

  I can appreciate that "18" alone saves space, but my first thought was that it was September 18th. You could use 2018 or '18 maybe?

  Put a max width on the conference icons and a margin on the right - the widest ones are butting up against their names.

• by mcpherrinm on 7/25/17, 6:34 AM

  Pretty cool! Still a lot of work on missing conferences, but hopefully that can self-correct if it becomes popular and organizers submit their conferences.

  Most security conferences are missing. Black Hat, bssides (except canberra, apparently), defcon, toorcon, recon, usenix, chaos computer club congress, RSA.

• by Confiks on 7/24/17, 10:13 PM

  While technically not a conference, you're missing a big one: SHA2017 in The Netherlands [1]. Starts the 4th of August, and there are still some tickets left.

  [1] https://wiki.sha2017.org/w/Main_Page

• by gargarplex on 7/25/17, 3:01 AM

  I did something similar (as an SEO gambit). Filterable by country (click the map). Feel free to take my data!

  https://codefor.cash/startup-developer-tech-conferences-2017...

• by znpy on 7/24/17, 10:24 PM

  Nice idea, but buggy implementation: if I search for "Germany" nothing shows up. If I type "Berlin, Germany" (an event show up).

  You might want to fix this.

• by cyrofox on 7/24/17, 10:35 PM

  DataFox also has a solution for indexing valuable conferences that syncs with your Salesforce. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq5uauwm4TU&t=0s

• by jonfriese33 on 7/24/17, 9:41 PM

  When I type in a city to the "Where" box and hit enter, it flashes quick but doesn't seem to filter.

  Also whenever I type anything into the "Keyword" box nothing is returned.

• by adventured on 7/25/17, 12:42 PM

  You should perhaps consider turning this into a paid email list service, that routinely sends out an update on the conference list with a bit more information on each. Charge maybe as low as $5 or as high as $12, per year. A couple thousand subscribers over time and you have yourself a nice side business. If you make it inexpensive enough, people will be happy receiving the updates via email, rather than having to remember to visit your site regularly.

• by s73ver on 7/24/17, 10:13 PM

  Suggestion: Add the conferences talk submission info and deadlines, so you can use it to find out what conferences to talk at.

• by wichert on 7/24/17, 9:52 PM

  Nice idea. The searchability is certainly nice.

  For a much more complete listing (although with a somewhat different focus) you can also use the LWN community calendar, which has been around for what feels like forever: https://lwn.net/Calendar/

• by bdcravens on 7/24/17, 10:32 PM

  Notice that the app doesn't really keep a history of state. After executing a search, back arrow on browser doesn't do what the user would expect. Either give a "reset" option, or better, don't break the browser and implement something like pushState()

• by aaossa on 7/25/17, 5:38 AM

  I loved it! Already submited a local conference. Hope you make it to the front page :) You could stick some users if you create some kind of newsletter according to location and/or event tags. If you want some help, I would work on this!

• by lesterpig on 7/25/17, 7:48 AM

  Nice work! There is still room for improvements, but this website will certainly provide a lot of value to developers.

  As an additional feature, considering the target audience, I would suggest to add some API with filter option, using CalDav format for example [0]. Everyone would be able to fetch latest data from conferencelist in their local calendars ;)

  [0]: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4791

• by andreashansen on 7/25/17, 8:46 AM

  Nice, a much-needed tool! Suggestion: make it a collaborative effort to keep it updated. In practice, it can be solved rather easily. Host the website on Github Pages. Have a single file in the github repository named e.g. conferences.json which the website reads over AJAX. Anyone can submit pull requests (PR) to add to or modify the conferences.json file, effectively allowing community members to help you maintain the website's freshness.

• by Gys on 7/25/17, 11:30 AM

  Some things I would like:

  - See fees (including deadlines for each phase ?)

  - Subscribe (by email) to tags (new conferences with a certain tag) and/or ending of Early Bird phase (or other phases)

  - Have rss feed based on tag(s)

  - See similar conferences (based on tags)

  - Button to add a conference to my calendar (or maybe have Google calendar feed, based on tags)

  - Filter by region; I do not mind flying a few hours, meaning anywhere in Europe for me. But I will never go to the US and not easily to Asia.

• by xexers on 7/25/17, 2:15 AM

  You're missing all of the QA conferences!

  http://testingconferences.org/

• by xando on 7/25/17, 9:43 AM

  Great idea go for it!

  lanyrd.com is long dead without any good replacement. I'm not too sure why they keep the website up. What it does it only confuses people. I know that this probably out of their control right now. Eventbrite killed the really good website.

  The service they had was solving real problem. Now you are solving real problem. Good luck!

• by hammerha on 7/24/17, 7:37 PM

  Looks nice. I've wanted something like this. It would be better if I can subscribe a search result.

• by LorenzoLlamas on 7/26/17, 3:40 AM

  Ugh. Why is everyone excited about yet another online directory? Is it because it is tech conferences and people here are just jazzed by lists of dorky things they can do besides mow their lawns (sorry, for folks outside SF who actually have lawns), or do their regular maintenance on their car?

  This is not a problem that needs a solution. It's yet another developer (or wanna-be 'need a job in development' person) who needs a puff portfolio piece that shows he knows how to connect a few database fields with a front-end display - and mixed with search! Wow! (Well, it mostly works anyway).

  I have yet to see one of these ShowHN pieces be anything but the latter. They should split ShowHN into ShowHNFluffYouBuiltToGetAJob and ShowHNStuffThatSavesLives, because I'd only be interested in the second one.

  And of course, you have to have your submissions vetted by the guy who not only "promises" to always maintain this (I call), but who obnoxiously floats his Twit handle over the footer as you scroll... he either doesn't believe in crowd-sourcing genuinely or doesn't want to deal with a user-end database. Likely, he'll turn that "I don't charge to be listed" into "listings are only $99/year" pretty quickly.

  Whoever said this guy was solving a "simple and actual problem" is sadly misleading this poor fellow. It was not a problem. Conferences are not concerned that there are not enough listing sites out there. Conference attendees are aware of, in their respective circles, where to go and what to attend. It's not a simple problem. It's not a problem at all.

  What is a problem is the proliferation (i.e. clutter) of the internet of everyone and their sister building fluffy stuff with .co and .io domains. Can I just block all such domains from my browser? My internet would actually be better if I could.

  Sigh... the death of the Yahoo Directory was heading toward this all along, wasn't it?

• by wanderr on 7/24/17, 10:16 PM

  Does this do direct match on location only, or search in a radius? San Francisco only shows things happening in the city proper, no surrounding areas. Could be that's all there is but I'd expect other parts of the bay to show up as well.

• by simon_acca on 7/24/17, 9:52 PM

  Nice, thank you for this! I would suggest ordering the events by distance from the typed location, instead of filtering with a perfect match.

  This way the user only has to type one location instead of trying a bunch of places near him/her.

• by TheArcane on 7/25/17, 12:20 PM

  AutoSens isn't listed on it.

  http://auto-sens.com/autosens-brussels/

• by fuzzygroup on 7/25/17, 9:35 AM

  I am all in favor of side projects but I found a number of disturbing errors:

  * There are no conferences for either Ruby or Elixir * There are no conferences on bitcoin * There is only one conference for React * You can leave data in the form on where by not picking autocomplete and then it appears to have searched for it but gives incorrect results * The only way to clear the date settings is to reload the page

  I love the concept and the lack of knowing what conferences are happening even nearby is a very real problem but I think there are issues with your database and your search interface.

• by kumarski on 7/25/17, 2:20 AM

  Spingo.com maintains these all and so does predicthq.com.

• by kafkaesq on 7/24/17, 9:17 PM

  Nice. An ability to filter by price (and actual availability), application / submission deadline, and volunteer opportunity would be useful, also.

• by mauerbac on 7/24/17, 10:27 PM

  I built something very similar: http://confir.io/

• by mberger on 7/25/17, 1:44 PM

  It crashed when i tried submitting a conference with a lot of tags. Where can I submit a bug report?

• by rospaya on 7/25/17, 3:13 PM

  Excellent page! I suggest adding a filter for continents (where > Europe doesn't work).

• by harrisreynolds on 7/26/17, 3:27 PM

  Another use case for this is finding conferences to speak at. Nicely done!

• by pspeter3 on 7/24/17, 9:26 PM

  Thanks so much! I've been looking for something like this for Asana.

• by garysieling on 7/24/17, 10:13 PM

  Are you manually entering conferences in your database?

• by sainib on 7/25/17, 1:37 AM

  Have any of you open sourced your app, by any chance?

• by Norfair on 7/25/17, 12:14 PM

  How about sorting by deadline for submissions?

• by contingencies on 7/25/17, 2:28 AM

  Nothing in Shenzhen.