Hello and welcome to the Julia Community!
This is a blog post for newcomers and community members alike to describe where and when you can find Julians around cyberspace and in the real world. I will talk about what different venues offer, how people usually interact, and what you can expect from going to these forums.
Enjoy! If you find this blog post helpful, consider sponsoring this account on GitHub.
JuliaCon is centered around people presenting cool stuff they've learned or built and sharing those experiences and code with others. Given the growth of the community, a committee exists to select proposals months in advance and guide them through a submission process so that their talk/poster can be processed and uploaded online as part of the conference. The announcement happens on Discourse and is usually 3-4 months before JuliaCon itself. Submission is open to everybody, including you! (And we'd love to hear from you!) This year, a workshop for livestreamed Questions and Answers CfP was made to help newcomers. Once the submissions are sorted out, the Organizing Committee (OrgComm) publishes a schedule for which talks will happen where.
Due to the ongoing Covid19 pandemic, JuliaCon2020 and JuliaCon2021 have been online. This makes physical conferences a logistical nightmare and health hazard, so it's easier to do the following:
Ask every accepted submission to pre-record their talk.
Plan a schedule
Publish the recorded talks according to the schedule, with the presenter available on the Discord chat so that people can ask questions simultaneously via text as the event is being livestreamed.
This is the best of many worlds:
There's no rush to watch everything all the time because everything goes on Youtube anyways.
You can chat to you heart's desire about the given topic without putting anyone at risk
This is geographically inclusive - even if you miss the speaker due to timezones, you can probably ask them questions later, and watch the talk at your best convenience.
Saves some flights and C02 emissions
But unfortunately we don't meet each other face to face, and human interaction can be a great thing.
It's the best that we can muster at the time. Now, on to the schedule.
The schedule works as follows:
1 week before the conference different workshops will be had. Some happen concurrently. These are also recorded (but not pre-recorded) and you can ask the presenter questions.
During the normal JuliaCon (July 28-31th), different events will happen on different colored tracks red, green, purple. This tells you on which channel of the Discord you can find the speakers for the event.
At the end of the conference, there's usually a social coding event known as a Hackathon - this just means that people find each other and help each other out with projects or discussing design and whatnot.
After the conference is done, the Discord server is locked down so that people can see new messages but no one can post anymore. This is usually a good moment to take the discussions over to Zulip/Slack if you're so inclined.
That's the conference!
Let's dig a lil' deeper into all the different events.
Different things happen simultaneously at JuliaCon, here's what you can expect if you attend any of these:
Workshops: Start 1 week before JuliaCon (week of the 21st of July). These are longer talks (~few hours) on a specific topic like Differential Equations, DataFrames, GPU examples - all the fun stuff.. The point is to work through examples as a group and be able to ask the presenters questions during the talk.
Talk/Lightning talk: The meat and potatoes of the conference. All year round, people build cool stuff with Julia and share those experiences here. Lightning talks are shorter (~5-10 mins) and talks are longer. You do not have to be an uber wizard to present a talk - as long as it's interesting, people will likely want to hear about it!
Experience: a new addition to JuliaCon. We want to cast a wide net and hear about any experience that you had while learning or using Julia, especially if you're getting started.
Poster: Some talks make more sense presented as a poster (in the style of an academic poster). There is a dedicated time slot for these and people also come and ask questions about them. Great for sharpening your technical chops for rigorous presentations.
TODO: Gather town!
Birds of a Feather: known as BoFs.
Keynotes:
A special mention about the Proceedings: This is an open-access journal published in cooperation with Open Journals. This is a great venue for those who need academic credit for contributing in the conference, but it's by no means limited to just an academic audience.
English and other languages
Not StackOverflow
MWE
Code fencing
thread splitting
Liking / bookmarking
Tags
Convo model: find where you should ask, then go for it.
don't ask to ask, just do it.
emojis
DMs
spamming channels
popular channels: random, helpdesk, general, appreciation, gripes, internals, triage
triage calls
not private
the slack holeeeee
Very similar to slack: open source, more private, different convo model
JuliaBloggers (shoutout to RandyZwitch)
Franklin.jl to build your own.