Attending the 2nd Solid Symposium

Yes, it's finally happening. My first Solid conference!

This is something I've been looking forward for a long time. I've attended some Solid-adjacent events, like local meetups or presenting at FOSDEM. But I have never been to a conference exclusive to Solid (not that there are many that I'm aware of). However, I'm trying to keep my expectations in check because I already had a bittersweet experience with a Laravel conference.

The main thing I'm looking forward to, honestly, is meeting people. This is not always the case; when I attend FOSDEM I'm very much looking forward to the presentations themselves. But I guess I've been into Solid for so long that I don't think anything will be revealing to me. I'm looking forward to being suprised, though!

Something else I'm excited about, of course, is to present my own talks. I'm actually giving two: one about Developer Experience, and once about CRDTs.

I've always been interested about DX, and I believe it is one of the most important things to get right if we want Solid to ever pick up. I worry that my presentation ended up too specific to my own tooling, but I always mention it in passing so it's nice to finally dedicate a presentation to everything I've been building under the hood. And I'm looking forward to see what people think, because it seems like the approach I'm taking is very much outside of most Solid developers zeitgeist. But I feel like it's the norm for the developer communities I admire when it comes to DX, like Laravel and Rails.

I'm also very interested in CRDTs and local-first software, but that's something more recent that I stumbled upon trying to solve my problems with Solid. In particular, I'm focusing this talk and my work on making it work in practice. A lot of the work happening in Solid is very theoretical or experimental, but again, if we ever want Solid to pick up we need to make things that people can use. So I'm excited to share my views on this, and how I solved it in my own apps.

Unfortunately, the presentations are not going to be recorded. So I'll have to miss the ones I can't attend. But fear not, I will record mine after the conference :).

The Symposium is officially over, and if I had to compress my experience to a single sentence I would say that I got drunk on excitement.

Yes, I also had a couple of beers (we were in Belgium, after all). But the conversations were a lot more stimulating than the alcohol. It was awesome meeting so many people from the Solid community, old and new, and discuss about all sort of topics. Here's a list of some things I talked about:

• Students as ideal potential members of the Solid community (and teachers as the best way to reach them).
• NLNet (as ever, they seem to be funding a lot of projects from the community).
• Adding more social aspects to my apps (both for people who enjoy sharing their movie-watching/cooking habits, and to create network effects).
• A Solid Pod acting as a proxy for file-based cloud providers (Nextcloud, Google Drive, Dropbox, etc.).
• Local-first interoperability (different apps working together with the local data).
• DefinitelyShaped (I'll let you guess what that means).
• etc.

I've never been as excited about Solid as I am now. We still have some important problems to overcome, but I think most of us at the Symposium were aligned with the direction we want to take. So I'm hopeful for the future.

Also, I did enjoy the talks and learned a thing or two! In particular, I really enjoyed the second part of the Real Time Solid session. I first shared my very simple, yet effective, approach to making CRDTs work with Solid. And then, George and Michael took it up a notch with their real hardcore CRDTs, m-ld and Braid.

And that would be it for this task, but as I mentioned I plan on releasing a recording of my talks for the people who couldn't attend. I should get that done within the next couple of weeks.