An update about the ServerSide.swift videos

Hi everyone! 👋

I know there have been lots of questions and enquiries about the videos from last year's conference, and lots of (justified) criticism about the delay in releasing them and lack of communication. I wanted to give you an update on what's happening and what the plan is.

First, an apology. It has taken way too long to get any videos out and the lack of communication and transparency has only made things worse. Despite all the issues, there's no excuse for the overall delay and I'm sorry for that.

The videos have been...challenging in many aspects. To start with, there was a miscommunication between the AV production team and myself which meant that the on-screen slides were not recorded - you know the actually useful part. This means that I need to rerecord all the presentations with the slides from the presenters and go through and ensure the right slide is shown on screen at the right time. Not only is this a massively time-consuming task, it meant it was impossible to outsource the editing as you need someone who understands the context for the presentations.

The next issue was that the encoding format used by the cameras was unknown to anything other than VLC when you attempted to play them back. I eventually worked out the incantation required to make FFMPEG convert them to a usable format, but it took a lot of trial and error to get there and a lot of time to transcode them all. Then the editing software I use refused to import the video files, so there has been a lot of back and forth with the developers and support team to try and find a way to import the videos.

This combined with an extremely challenging year personally, and the current economic climate which meant I had to spend more time into trying to find work to pay the bills, meant the videos got pushed down the priority list. (Anyone who goes into conferences to make money is in for a shock 😂 - the ServerSide.swift conference is extremely lucky to have amazing sponsors every year to ensure that the conference is viable but we still didn't come close to breaking even last year.)

However, I'm now in a position where all the problems are solved and we can start producing the videos so you should start to see them appear on Youtube in the next couple of weeks. I'll post an update with progress every few weeks until they're all updated (hopefully it will only require one more update).

The next conference

I've also had lots of questions this year about the next edition of the conference and when it will be happening. There will not be a ServerSide.swift this year, however I am planning for one early next year. December is difficult time of year to hit. Not only do you have to compete with Christmas, where many people are away or traveling and many things are much more expensive, you're competing with a lot of other conferences. It's also harder to get sponsorships and for companies to send people as many companies want those budgets decided upon early in the year and they're frequently used up by December.

So I'm planning the next edition of the conference to be sometime around February or March next year. So really only a few months delay! Hopefully there will be more to announce in the coming weeks and months.

Hopefully this should provide a bit of much-needed transparency to ServerSide.swift and if you have any questions fell free to reach out on email, Twitter, Discord etc.

Tim