Last night at a dinner with Ivan Krstić and
Itamar Shtull-Trauring, we were all
lamenting that too many (all?) software conferences focus specifically on
positive results. This is what you want, of course, if you treat a
conference as purely a marketing venue. However, most learning takes place
based on something that someone did wrong and then needed to correct,
not something that they did right.
All of the great software developers I know have at least one great
story of how a project they were working on was a complete disaster.
Often these projects are shielded from the public eye, since nobody wants to
talk about failure. So, how do we make a public discussion of these
ideas socially acceptable?
Thus, an idea was born: FAILcon. The idea is simple: submitted talks
and papers must be related to projects which failed in an interesting
way. The larger the better, of course — the bigger they are, the
harder they fail — but anything that failed in an interesting way would be a
valid subject for discussion.
I'm writing about it so that it won't be forgotten, because I think it's a
great idea. But I doubt that any of us are going to organize a
conference any time soon. So please, steal this idea. Does
anyone out there with conference-organizing skills want to get something
together based around the common theme of failure?