Lazy Coder

One of the after effect of the successful Demo Day II is a question about SilverKey's motive in running a pure technical conference to developers for free and without sales pitch.

To understand our motive, you need to see the origin of the Demo Day itself.

We had been doing internal demo day in SilverKey since early last year. We took one day off every month and dedicated it for presentations on any topics, by everybody that's willing to present. Those demo days were filled with crazy topics with the latest and greatest and weirdest technologies and concepts.

This is the reason why if you take a look at our Public Demo Day topics, they are all either new  or novel and interesting  ideas or really hard core advanced topics. It's because those are the topics that we are interested talking internally.

In September, after the nth internal Demo Day, we thought, hey, why not open this to public? Let's do a small conference and see what happens.

It was a crazy idea because as a company we never ran a conference before. We are developers and not some polished presenters with dazzling power points.  We are a software company. Our day job is to create software, not to train people or sell some vendors' technologies.

But we thought it was a good idea and worth a try, so yes, we tried it.

We booked a conference room at Samiramis for 100 people and opened the registration. We prepared 5 topics running in sequence. In four days, we were flooded with 455 registrations. We had to close the registration 2 weeks before the event started.

The two paragraph above is worth repeating. "But we thought it was a good idea and worth a try, so yes, we tried it.". Nobody forced us to do it, no company paid us to do it, we were not selling anything to the developers.

We thought it was a good idea and it's worth trying. So we did it.

It was a risky move for many reasons (we never did it before, we didn't know about audience reaction to the advanced topics, etc) - but heck, never let a certain amount of risks get in the way of a good idea.

The day came and we did really well. The audience was really receptive to the topics and presentation we did.

We also received a lot of great feedback from our audiences and their desires to see our continued effort in our public Demo Day.

So we planned for Demo Day II.

And we argued internally about how much change we should introduce to the second Demo Day. Should we go conservative or should we go bold and really push it just like what we did the first time.

We decided to be bold and push it and introduced fundamental changes to Demo Day format and aim for a lot of people.

It would have parallel format and it would have some new experimentation medium in the sessions. Many details of Demo Day got tweaked, revised and canceled for many reasons but in the end the spirit of the goal was achieved. We had parallel sessions, we had a lot of people (more than triple our original attendance in the first Demo Day) and we experimented with the Open Mic idea.

We chose the topics that we both care about and think will be useful for other developers as well. This is why you haven't see a session about SQL Server or Biztalk or Sharepoint or Microsoft Exchange in any of the public Demo Day. They simply never appeared in any of our 11 or 12 internal Demo Days.

After this Demo Day II, the feedback we got was that people are still receptive with the idea for Demo Day III. So we will do it again. And I suspect, we will again introduce new elements to the conference format and be experimental and take risks.

So there you go. We did Demo Day because we thought it was a good idea and continued doing it because our audience wants to have more of it and we still think it's a good idea.

I will write in further  paragraph why we thought it's a good idea but let me address the issue of Microsoft and Demo Day.

SilverKey Demo Day topics are very heavily based on Microsoft .Net technologies. That's natural because we use a lot of .Net technologies in our daily work but not exclusively on Microsoft products alone. We use standards like Javascript, open source tools like NUnit, cool Firefox extension like "Firebug", etc. I think you found out that  our nature was  reflected in the selection of topics we chose for this last Demo Day II.

We didn't address Java topics or PHP topics because  we didn't know much enough or care enough about that side of technologies (but we do respect them).

We did approach Microsoft Egypt for some sort of cooperation for SK Demo Day II, especially in the freebie area. We had this plan of giving audiences some free stuff like free Microsoft books or t-shirts or software or some cool goodies that a company like Microsoft usually provides for their developers community. Unfortunately for various reasons that I cannot disclose here it wasn't possible to form that cooperation this time.

So in Demo Day II there was no freebie or give away random cool stuff. We planned to have it but it didn't get materialized.

These are some reasons why we think a public Demo Day is a good idea.

• SilverKey as a company does not exist in a vacuum. The great developers that we have is a product of Egyptian IT community and infrastructure and schooling system. We as a company benefits from all of those factors. It is the right thing to do to give something back to the community. If you think about  it, it's just common sense. Give and take - it's a simple concept.
• We like to do it because it's fun thing to do (a lot of hard work, yes) because we get to meet a lot of you and exchange tips and ideas.  
• It forces us to learn and deal with the issue of public speaking and communicating ideas clearly with a lot of people.
• It is an avenue for us to experiment with ideas with the participation of audiences. This is why we really appreciate your support by waking up early on a nice Summer Saturday and come and join us in 'geeking' out talking about technologies.
• Man, it is really motivating to see the feedback and encouragement that we have received from the developers community here in Egypt about the Demo Day.
• I know it's not common here in Egypt for companies to do event like Demo Day other than platform vendors such as IBM or Microsoft. But hey, we view the world as what it should be, not what it currently is. We should have more developers community events here in Cairo - we love to hang out and talk about code and designs. We have the means to do such gathering, so hey, let's do it. There's no need to wait for others to do it for us.

So for all of above reasons, it is worth it for us to spend money and time to do public Demo Days (the cost in term of time and money are quite significant).

But the fundamental philosophy of a company is not to make money  or save money(people get confused about it a lot). The fundamental philosophy of a company is to make things happen and allow the creation of new and wonderful things and ideas. Money and profits are the facility to allow companies to continue to do so again and again and again in perpetuity.

And maybe, just maybe, we can change the world in some way to make it a better place. Just like what  that one guy called Tim Berners-Lee did.