6 Years and 180 (Virtual) Events Later...

Back in 2017, most folks were skeptical when it came to virtual events. This included me.

I had been attending IRL (in-real life) developer conferences as a speaker and attendee many years at that point, both in the context of my job in DevRel or prior. I'd even run a long list of IRL conferences including ones in Boston, New York City and even Sofia, Bulgaria. I have a passion for learning and for connecting with the developer community, and conferences provided an outlet for both. I was skeptical that virtual events could provide that.

It was in that context that I orginally created Certified Fresh Events (or CFE.dev, as I now typically refer to it) this week in 2017. It was going to be an outlet to run developer events – outside of my work responsibilities – in person. And yet, here I am about to run my 180th virtual event on Tuesday. How'd that happen? How'd I go from being a virtual event skeptic to a a virtual event veteran?

On a side note, I am super excited about Tuesday's talk not just because it is the 6 year anniversary but also because it's on a really important topic for developers: Building Your Front-End with Intention where Chad Stewart will show us create a front-end architecture with intention by leveraging component-driven design. Join us at 1pm ET (UTC -4).

Necessity is the mother of virtual events...or something like that

IRL events are expensive. I don't just mean they are expensive to attend (though they are, especially once you add in flights, meals and hotel). I mean that they take a large amount of investment up-front. There's usually a substantial venue deposit and equipment costs and speaker travel and marketing costs and so on. Even for someone who has run a lot of developer events, it's a risky investment.

So I decided to build awareness of my new conference venture by running some virtual events. Having been in the industry for a long time and having participated in and organized a lot of events, I knew a lot of great speakers. My thought was, I could do a handful of virtual events, build a mailing list and then use that to launch my IRL events.

But the virtual events exceeded my expectations. It wasn't just that my first event in on August 23, 2017 had 250+ live attendees, it was that I found that I could scratch that itch around learning and developer community nearly as well with a virtual event than with a IRL event. Sure, chat was no replacement for the "hallway track", but there were a ton of benefits to virtual events:

1. They were low-risk. I had to pay for a platform to run the events (I've been on Crowdcast for the entire 6 years), but there were no other significant costs to get started. This meant I could run as many of them as I wanted for, more or less, a fixed cost.
2. They were free. Because of the low risk, I could make them freely available to attend.
3. They were global. My speakers could come from anywhere around the world, as did my attendees.
4. They were recorded. Recording IRL events can get costly, so many organizers don't do it. Because my events were virtual, they were always recorded.

Don't get me wrong. I didn't come to believe virtual events were a IRL event replacement, but I did come to see that they had great value.

6 years later...

One thing Covid shutdowns did was convince many people that there is value in virtual events. Sure, many of us miss that in-person interaction, but there's room for both. I've increased the amount of programming and special events that I run on CFE.dev, so there's defintely a lot more going on now that there was 6 years ago, but we've amassed some crazy stats over those 6 years:

• 180+ events
• 230+ presentations
• Almost 200 speakers
• 240+ recordings
• 25+ interviews
• 7 virtual conferences
• 8 workshops

And in recent years, every single one of these events is free, including the entire archive of the last 6 years. If CFE.dev played a helpful role in your developer career, I'd love to hear from you and I hope you'll continue to be a part of the community. If you've never heard of the site or been to one of our events, now's the best time. We've got so much going on!

P.S. If your company is interested in sponsoring CFE to help me keep offering free developer events, you can find our prospectus here.