2026-02-04 wOLFcon Developer Experience

1 min

Scribe

@Jeff Gerhard followed by @Wayne Schneider

Reminder:  Please copy/paste the Zoom chat into the notes.  If you miss it, this is saved along with the meeting recording, but having it here has benefits.

wOLFcon Developer Experience

ALL

During last year’s wolfcon, it was suggested to have a developer focused track during the conference. The current mindset is a virtual conference 6 months away from wolfcon

• What's the primary goal for the virtual conference?

• What duration makes sense?

• Do we want to consider multiple timezones?

• Live chat/discussion? Virtual “hallway track” space?

Maccabee: we probably do need to do a dreaded survey of developers to answer the above

Craig: Any sense of what participation might be? Olamide suggests that virtual makes it better for developers; they have their own team meetings. Maybe as many as 50 people?

Christie: We can ask if people would participate, what their interest level is?

Maccabee: Different motivators. Some people might want to do presentations, some might rather do breakouts and conversations

PRIMARY GOAL-

• knowledge sharing? Awareness? Documentation? Networking?

• Showcase?

• Wayne: due to microservices, there may be a lack of knowledge about common topics – example of kafka messaging queue – not knowing what is available. Larger architectural issues. Olamide agrees that this is difficult, hard to hear about good things happening in Folio. Slack channels not that active for devs – distilling this into information sharing

• Kevin - re: networking, Slack and SIGs – could try to break barrier and do more planning from a community perspective instead of employer or project perspective. Olamide: there can be hallway channels, plus each session can have a channel. So people can hop in and out of chats – an opportunity to network

• Ingolf: Good for who would like to BECOME developers, not just current devs. IDeas like – how to construct a new module.

• Kevin: From TC perspective –we have various topics like versions required / updating to new versions of libraries/stacks – could help folks

• Jeff: Would be good to hear developers' take on what the pain points are, what is on their wishlist for technical improvements

• Zak: What are cross-cutting issues – and what resourcing is available? Developers need decision-making support to frame concerns about things like upgrading individual modules/libraries. There needs to be some project management – this is not just a developer audience. Examples; how to leverage kafka, how to manage microservices. These are not ONLY developer topics

• Wayne: to Zak’s point - concerns cut across operations

• Maccabee: to Zak’s point - figuring out balance of notetaking/recording – some people will want to gripe about things without all stakeholders being there. we might want to frame this less as a conference FOR developers and more of a conference about developer topics with multiple stakeholders

DURATION

• Kevin: if it is a “conference” then it should be multiple days. One aspect of a conference is the social aspect, would want to support that type of engagement somehow

• Ingolf in chat: 1 to 3 days

• Maccabee - Blacklight conf was not full days – 3 partial days

• Craig: maybe 3 half days. In chat: 3 full days is too much time to fill up for virtual conf

• Jenn: something like module-building would be similar to pre-conference workshops. Could have longer tutorial sessions, then a day with more talking sessions

• Maccabee: A lengthy agenda would not be terrible if people could just tune in to the things they are most interested in

• Ingolf: Should be at least multiple days. Give people time to explore something, play around, report back another day

• Olamide: multiple days would be good but not full days. Few hours plus Slack channels for topics

• Jeff: less than full day also good for time zone differences

Sounds like coalescing into multiple days, less than full days. 2 to 3 days.

TIMEZONES QUESTION

• Maccabee: yes we should, we would lose people if not. But should be driven by survey responses

• Wayne: biggest delta is eastern Europe vs. western U.S. (not to mention China, Australia). Cannot fully resolve this – people will have to make decisions

• Kevin: not totally in favor of this, but presenters could go twice for multi time zones

LIVE CHAT/ VIRTUAL HALLWAY QUESTION

• Maccabee: best virtual conference seen was Charleson conf, everyone pre-recorded presentation. In the actual timeslot, the presenter was in chat and could comment

• Zak: comparable to flipped classrooms with homework being watching a recorded lecture

• Olamide: pre-recording might be easier for conference organizers

• Wayne: may be a bigger ask for presenters – could be a barrier

  • Olamide - maybe video editing support could help. Can add this to survey questions – thoughts about pre-recording?

• Christie: generally likes to have a back-channel hallway track. Do we have staff to support multiple async conversations?

SURVEY

• Christie to look at notes and start something

RESOURCING

• Olamide - we can start with a vision and then maybe scale down to something manageable. We are not expecting to require software – just using tools we already have and use.

NA

Zoom Chat

You 11:16 AM
I'm having so many technical challenges lately and cannot raise my hand! I have a comment when I can get in the queue

Zak Burke (EBSCO) 11:29 AM
Clarifying my thinking further as I’ve heard others riff on it: developers can identify technical topics worth of discussion and decision making, but we need additional support to actually make those decisions and to help with prioritization.

Ingolf Kuss 11:29 AM
1-3 days

Craig McNally 11:30 AM
3 full days is a lot of time to fill up, and a significant time investment

Day, Kevin 11:30 AM

3 full days is a lot of time to fill up, and a significant time investment

Yea..that is one of the problems with multi-day.

Maccabee Levine 11:34 AM
This is the agenda I referred to: https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/blacklightsummit2025

You 11:34 AM
less than a full day is probably also good for time zone differences

Zak Burke (EBSCO) 11:38 AM
A “constructing a module” workshop would be great for new devs and could help expand the audience of devs across more institutions. Great! But what’s stopping us from doing that now and recording it? At some level, it is not that different than “FOLIO should provide some getting-started-with-development resources”, which isn’t really news. Is our developer community small because our documentation is hard to break into, or, as mentioned previously, is this more a resourcing problem (new institutions contributing new devs, existing institutions contributing documentation) than a documentation problem?

Ingolf Kuss 11:41 AM
Good question. I am not able to answer it. Maybe this question should be addressed at the institutional level / in the PC ?

Ingolf Kuss 11:43 AM
pre-recorded lectures sound like they can make the conference more productive.

You 11:44 AM
Different formats would require more or less time and planning. Moderators, schedule management

Day, Kevin 11:45 AM
You could create recording snippets and merge them. Each one focused on a brief topic.
I've seen a lot if linkedin learning training videos do this.

Ingolf Kuss 11:46 AM
what is a hallway track ?

Maccabee Levine 11:48 AM
Have to run in a minute -- great discussion!

Day, Kevin 11:49 AM
I think some terminology I have heard used for something like the dedicated sessions are "breakout sessions" where the main chat breaks into smaller separate sub-groups.
This works well for large groups and badly for small groups.

Craig McNally 11:51 AM
I have to drop.  Parting thought... apologies if this was already mentioned.  Doing something like lightning talks (15 minutes max) might be a good idea.  Developers may be more willing to participate in something like that as opposed to leading a much longer session requiring more effort/prep/etc.

You 11:52 AM
I guess my big question is about resourcing. This is a big undertaking

Wayne Schneider 11:53 AM
I think the resourcing is mainly people, right?