Kranky Geek SF 2019 – post event summary

Our best Kranky Geek event ever. Or is it just that I have a short memory? :-)

Earlier this month marked the highlight of the year for me. It happens every year now since 2015. The Kranky Geek event takes place in San Francisco. The event started by mistake and had become an immensely taxing and enjoyable undertaking for me.

WebRTC is a niche of an industry that are here to change the world and challenge how we communicate online with each other in real time. Kranky Geek became a place where our WebRTC niche meets, mingles and discusses many aspects of what it is that we’re doing. A lot of it is technology - and learnings people had and the scars they have to show for it. Some of it is more future looking, where new requirements are shared and semi-pitches are made. It is also a place where we get to talk and interact with the people behind the browser implementations.

I decided to share this slide about how niche WebRTC is:

This shows Stack Overflow Trends for WebRTC, VoIP and SIP. It is the percentage of questions in each month that shows these technologies as tags. WebRTC is higher than either SIP or VoIP by a factor of 3, which is nice. But overall, we’re still talking 0.05% of the questions, which isn’t much. WebRTC is a niche, but an important one (at least to me).

What is Kranky Geek all about

Kranky Geek is about the current state and the immediate future of the WebRTC ecosystem. It is first and foremost an event for developers.

Here’s what I understood at a client meeting earlier in that same week. After the meeting, the client comes to me and tells me how he is using the videos from past Kranky Geek events. Whenever there is a technical detail or a topic he knows is covered by one of our past sessions, he just goes and searches the videos to find that 2-3 minutes he needs.

It got me thinking. It is quite similar to how I use it. I end up referring people to a specific Kranky Geek video at least once a month if not more.

In the end, we are into learning and expanding the knowledge available out there about WebRTC.

The obligatory thanks

The Kranky Geek event isn’t funded by the audience’ tickets. These are practically free. We have a low registration fee that is a kind of a seriousness fee, which makes it easier to estimate the actual attendance rates we will see. That fees ends up being donated to good causes. In the case of Kranky Geek, we’ve been giving that money to GDI.

The event is only possible due to its sponsors.

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There are a few people and companies that I need to thank for the Kranky Geek 2019 event.

First, to my partners in crime - Chris and Chad. Our different opinions and dispositions make a good mix for running Kranky Geek.

To Google and the Chrome WebRTC team at Google.

Google have been there with us from the beginning. They assist us tremendously with the logistics, their attendance and their sessions throughout the years.

To our sponsors of the event:

Their contribution is an important part of us being able to do this every year. I am also very happy that without exception, they treat their speaking slot and our rigorous process and dry runs seriously.

We had a new type of sponsors this year. Vendors who wanted to be part of the event, but didn’t speak (they came after we had a full agenda already).

Voximplant is a CPaaS vendor with WebRTC technology - one you should follow closely if you aren’t already.

Jamm just came out of stealth, and wanted to do that as part of our event.

What you can find in this year’s Kranky Geek sessions

We started off planning the event with a lot of AI in mind. This is what we had last year, and the trend is obvious to follow this year as well. It will probably still be a trend 5 years from now.

When we actually looked at our agenda, we found a nice mix of WebRTC topics, covering things from WebRTC specifications and best practices, through customizing and modifying WebRTC in production to new use cases and AI.

It is good we did a dry run to all of our speakers, since I didn’t really have the time and attention to listen to them during the event itself. I learned a lot of new things about WebRTC from the dry runs we have and I am sure you will find some very interesting and useful sessions here as well.

All of the videos are already available on YouTube and I encourage you to both subscribe and watch our 2019 playlist:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4_h-ulX5eNdJljPgBWAgD8l49YOjeMoc

See you next year?

Maybe.

We never really know if we will be having a next ever. This is part of the fact that we’re not professional event organizers. We do it because we enjoy it. We also rely on others to make this happen.

If you are interested in a Kranky Geek 2020, then do one of the following things (or all of them):

1. Subscribe to this blog - I’ll be sending out an email at some point with the event’s date if we decide to do another one
2. Subscribe to WebRTC Weekly - that’s who we email to about Kranky Geek events officially
3. Contact me directly - especially if you’re interested in speaking or sponsoring a future event