Harry R. Schwartz

I’m on a plane back to Boston after a lovely visit to San Francisco for EmacsConf 2015!

The conference was a ton of fun, and the organizers did a terrific job. They preemptively avoided my usual gripes by providing a solid code of conduct and a tasty vegan lunch. Samer also did an awesome job handling questions from IRC; I think it’s easy to make remote folks feel like second-class attendees, but I feel like he really worked hard to make sure they were heard by the in-person crowd. Great work!

They also handed out some pretty sweet stickers. M-x emacsconf-2015 =)

We had a bunch of great talks. I’m not going to try to pick any favorites, but I learned a ton about calc, combining TRAMP and babel, org-mode exporters, configuring golang, and a bunch of good stuff about community outreach. On that particular topic we had a couple great talks: Daniel Gopar spoke about the challenges that newbies face and Erik Hetzger offered some strategies for getting scientists and humanities folks to try out Emacs.

I gave a talk on starting Emacs meetups which I’ve since turned into an essay, as well as a lightning talk on engine-mode.

So! Thanks a bunch to the organizers, and thanks to thoughtbot for paying for my flight (and, in general, continuing to indulge my weird Emacs whims, despite remaining a pretty dedicated vim shop). Also, thanks to my friend Albert for letting me sleep on his futon!

Anyhoo, this whole thing was just a blast. It’s still a little early to tell, but maybe we’ll try hosting EmacsConf 2016 in Boston? No promises!