Learning is not a spectator sport

I am submitting (or a better term would be “trying to”) an abstract to a conference that has announced their Call for Papers. Like many conferences, there is a list of tracks/streams that are the focus of the conference, and hence the organizers would like your presentation to fit into one of those categories. For this particular conference, some of the streams include things like:

• LLMs in distributed systems
• AI-enhanced UIs
• Serverless/microservices
• ML/data mesh pipelines
• AI toolchains
• etc etc

That’s all well and good, but when I navigate the conference site, my experience has been

• Many of the static content links that are pretty critical (eg, the CFP Terms and Conditions) don’t work
• Submitting my bio information simply hangs and eventually times out
• Uploading the mandatory head shot crashes
• After giving up, I later got an email with “Submission created“. No clues about which of the submissions it was, and no link back to see what it was etc

And therein lies a problem with our industry (and conferences simply reflect this state of affairs). We love the new cool stuff! But when you take away all of the glossy veneer of cool new tech, the vast majority of functionality required by any app, including a conference CFP app, is

• Let people enter data
• Reliably save that data
• Let people see what data they saved
• Let them edit it (if that is a requirement of the app)

That’s it! Your complete list of requirements might be a lot longer than that, but those four are the first four on the list every…single…time. So before your CFP opens with “We’re looking for talks on AI blockchain quantized streaming donkey mesh“, maybe keep a stream in reserve for “Doing the damn fundamentals right“.