BACON: the conference on things developers love
January 23, 2012 § 5 Comments
Mint has a great conference policy for its employees. Last year, the tech team at Mint traveled all over Europe and North America, attending and speaking at traditional technology conferences like Arrrrcamp, and Strange Loop, but also off-the-wall choices like San Diego Comic-Con and Lebowski Fest.
Last summer, I had an idea. There’s lack of large conferences in London that we would like to attend. Also, we have been attending a lot of conferences, and have a lot of experience about what we like and don’t like. So why don’t we just throw a conference ourselves?
The Concept
Initially, I was inspired by the wide range of topics presented at Strange Loop. There were talks on functional programming, front-end web development, mobile development, scaling, machine learning: all great stuff I would want at our conference. However, I wanted our conference to be a little less academic and less enterprise, but I didn’t quite know how to explain what I did want. Our CEO Cameron, a former developer himself, had an idea: why don’t we broaden the scope to include not just practical development talks, but also talks on things we suspect other developers love too. For example: electronic music, memes & lolz, machine learning, graphics and visual effects, beer, sci-fi, video games, popular physics. And if we could incorporate development into these topics, even better!
The Name
It’s hard to name a conference this broadly scoped. Whenever we tried, the result was quite boring. We wanted the name to be fun, and reflect things that are loved in the developer community. So we named it BACON.
The Format
There are 2 rooms for talks. If you don’t love what’s in one room, go to the other. If you don’t love either, then go hack/network with other devs in the lounge areas.
We hate long talks, so each talk will be 30 minutes. The keynotes will be slightly longer.
Like a lot of conferences, we’re curating roughly half of the 32 talks, and choosing the others from user submissions. Please see for some of our confirmed speakers, and for information about submitting a talk proposal.
The Venue
We’re holding the conference at The Mermaid Conference and Events Centre in Blackfriars, London. I’ve been a few times to check it out, it’s great. There’s a nice auditorium, and a few of the rooms we’ll be using overlook the River Thames. The Mermaid is well connected by train, tube and bus.
Conclusion
We’re trying hard to make it the best developer conference ever. I hope you’ll come to BACON, either as a delegate, speaker or sponsor.
For tickets, please see .
If you’re interested in sponsoring, please see the . For sponsorship enquiries, please .
[…] The idea for Bacon came about following a pilgrimage of Mint developer Paul Fedory to Strangeloop in St. Louis. He found that the conference managed to strike a nice balance between tech and creativity. You can read about Fedory’s emotional journey here. […]
[…] The idea for Bacon came about following a pilgrimage of Mint developer Paul Fedory to Strangeloop in St. Louis. He found that the conference managed to strike a nice balance between tech and creativity. You can read about Fedory’s emotional journey here. […]
I wish I was a developer and I would sign up! Great portrait by the way.
[…] The idea for Bacon came about following a pilgrimage of Mint developer Paul Fedory to Strangeloop in St. Louis. He found that the conference managed to strike a nice balance between tech and creativity. You can read about Fedory’s emotional journey here. […]
[…] The idea for Bacon came about following the visit of Mint developer Paul Fedory to Strangeloop in St. Louis. He found that the conference managed to strike a nice balance between tech and creativity. You can read about the emotional journey on our technology blog ‘Logical Friday’ here. […]