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FEATURE
XDC Anywhere 2022
Attending XDC from the comfort of your home
Issue: 20.3 (May/June 2022)
Author: Marc Zeedar
Author Bio: Marc taught himself programming in high school when he bought his first computer but had no money for software. He's had fun learning ever since.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 13,390
Starting Page Number: 16
Article Number: 20303
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Excerpt of article text...
The last few years have been chaotic, to say the least. XDC 2020 in Nashville was canceled when Covid-19 reached the U.S. and ruined travel for everyone. No one knew what to expect of the future, but a year seemed far away, so XDC London was set for spring 2021... and later moved to the fall. Then it was moved again to March 2022, only to be canceled completely when the Omicron strain of Covid panicked the world last December.
In its place, Xojo decided to launch a "virtual" XDC in late April. Like most of you, I wasn't sure what to expect. It turned out to be mainly canned videos posted on YouTube (see Figure 1).
While there's nothing wrong with that, it takes away the community feel of an event. Events happen at a certain time and place—if you're not there, you miss it. And while a virtual event allows people from all around the world to participate, if everyone isn't tuning in at the same time and interacting, the "event" isn't so special. (That said, it is free, which will hopefully expand Xojo's reach and allow people who couldn't attend a conference to participate.)
On Thursday, April 28th, there were two "live" events: a Question and Answer with the Xojo engineers, followed by a "hangout" where everyone tuned in via Zoom and chatted about whatever they wanted. These interactive sessions were much more like a real Xojo conference and I'd like to see more of these.
One piece of good news is that in-person conferences aren't over. I had worried that after getting burned so many times XDC might not happen for a couple more years, but the folks at Xojo have scheduled a "Xojo Developer Retreat" in Nashville for September 19-20, 20202 (
https://www.xojo.com/xdc/HTML/developerretreat.html
). Dare I actually plan to go?(I am curious as to why this is called a "retreat" and not a conference, and why it is happening on a Monday-Tuesday rather than Wednesday-Friday as previous conferences were. I suspect that this is a sort of mini-conference, perhaps a more informal gathering, as opposed to a full-fledged event that requires more planning and presentations. At least Alyssa did say: "I can guarantee that the event in Nashville will have a Keynote like you would expect in both size and scope.")
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