While some of you are slowing down for the year end (not those involved in enterprise IT obviously, you’re frantically trying to close deals), we are ramping up. That’s right – it’s Monki Gras season again. For 2018 our conference dates fall on the 1st and 2nd of February, immediately preceding Fosdem again. The conference is fattening up nicely. We have an excellent theme, incredible speakers on board including Charity Majors, and a ridiculously cool venue in the heart of Shoreditch. Outreach to food and drink suppliers is well underway, and we’re planning for some neat surprises as ever.
The sister conference of the conference that began as a joke – where craft meets tech and social. Our theme this year is building to last: sustaining and maintaining code, communities, products and services. After last year’s focus on packaging and convenience it felt important this year to shift the focus and look at quality, sustainability and maintenance. As ever we seem to be surfing the zeitgeist: maintaining the maintainers is a major theme in our industry right now. So much of our infrastructure is taken for granted, how can we make sure that all the builders are properly looked after? I have been hugely inspired of late by the work of Nadia Egbhal and Pia Mancini (one of our speakers!)
Supporting maintainers is crucial but what about prosaic things likes documentation? In this post about the New Johnston typescript I wrote:
“One of the most intriguing things about Monki Gras 2017, which examined Packaging, was that good documentation bubbled up as one of the core themes people wanted to engage more with. My community is interested in good docs WTF? But actually it makes perfect sense. How we sustain what we do, bring on new adherents, respect the people that will come after us to maintain the systems we build – That. Is. Important.
Of course sustaining craft is about more than tech. It’s about a choice of materials, it’s about business models, it’s about communities that last. That’s what I want to examine at Monki Gras 2018.”
Good docs, a learning culture, investment in maintenance and maintainability, applicability of skills, these are themes this year. We’ll also have some typeface history. Check out the site to learn more. Buy your tickets here. And we still have open sponsorship offers.
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