One year on: What happened to ElectronConf2017?

In light of GitHub's acquisition, its a good time to look back at one of their bigger non-events from 2017.

June 2017, GitHub announced ElectronConf2017 devoted to one of the most controversial pieces of tech today. People love Electron because it makes it easy to develop cross-platform apps, and hate it because it does this by giving each app a full browser instance to do it. Personally, I'd be glad for experts in Electron to speak on how to build quality Electron apps (for example: VS Code) because if people are going to build using Electron as a user I'd like to see it done well.

The talks at ElectronConf2017, the first conference entirely devoted to Electron, used a blind review process for talks which due to the gender representation skew in tech led to an all male line up of speakers. This drew the ire of people on twitter. After many scathing tweets which got the attention of then VP of Social Impact Nicole Sanchez the conference was not only postponed, but publicly postponed before the presenters were told.

Fast forward to today: ElectronConf2017 was effectively cancelled due to outrage because certain people were unhappy with the lineup of speakers.

Why is this important?

Firstly, because speakers were robbed of the chance to present because people didn't like their gender. But from a broader perspective, like it or not Electron is here to stay. We have no way of knowing what improvements could have been made to the Electron framework as an outcome of that conference. There may have been an opportunity for the community to talk about improvements to auto-updating Electron apps, sandboxing the browser backend to reduce the disk and memory footprint, and who knows what other improvements to be made.

Because of the outrage of angry individuals, people were denied the opportunity the speak, and technology that is a huge part of the developer landscape has been impacted.

Will there be an ElectronConf 2018? Probably not.

3 comments

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legostormtroopr 8y ago ↗

Full disclosure: I posted about this when it happened - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14480868

tudelo 8y ago ↗

Reading through this thread is some entertaining stuff. It's interesting how diverse opinions are on forced diversity.

[dead] draw_down 8y ago ↗

I think the situation with regard to diversity in tech is pretty dismal. And the efforts to address it smell of status quo maintenance, not actually trying to fix it. Generally our industry is a bad, dehumanizing place to work. The people who don’t think so are the ones who make it that way.

Still, events like this one convinced me to stay almost entirely away from conferences. I certainly wouldn’t try to speak at one. I’ll attend perhaps one per year, but when I do, I don’t try to network and don’t converse with other attendees much, sometimes not at all.

The knives are out, as they should be in my opinion for the people who deserve it, but the problem is that things have been so bad for so long that there’s little reason to trust that any one person is a decent human. So you are operating with very little benefit of the doubt.

So, things are grim. But I also don’t agree that the only, or greater, tragedy is that some people didn’t get to talk about Electron. I think focusing only on what happens when people get upset about the shitty state of our industry is revealing in itself.