Sure, it happens. Especially if somebody is already well known and respected in their field.
But it is not common, and I find it frustrating how many people think they can fast-track their way to the bigger events. I've been on the committee that rejects their submissions and find myself having to diplomatically explain to them "you've never done this before, nobody has any idea who you are, you've done nothing to establish your credibility regarding this topic, and you were one of 1500 submissions for 50 available slots... sorry, kid, that's not how this works."
I did not mean to imply that steps could be skipped, just that they can be orchestrated more rapidly in some niches where there are a lot of conferences
Stallman can give a talk about "how to invent free software and build a movement around it" because Stallman has invented free software and built a movement around it. For Stallman, there is a significant overlap between "what it's like to be me" and "how to invent free software" - his version of that story is exactly the story nobody else can tell.
It's not about telling a better story. It's about telling a story better.
No, it's about perspective - I know that 'cos I wrote the article, but perhaps it didn't come across very clearly!
Here's the specific problem that advice is intended to remedy, which I have seen happen many, many times:
Somebody writes a talk about, say, what's new in C# 13. It's a solid talk: they've done the research, they've prepared some good demos. At local user groups, it does very well. At regional and community conferences, it does very well.
But it doesn't have any personality. It's not a case study. It's not based on using those features in production, or applying them to a specific domain. The presenter has read all the docs, run all the examples, maybe found an edge case or two, and put together a decent slide deck and some engaging demos - but even if they've done a fantastic job, there are a thousand other tech presenters out there who could do exactly the same thing.
They then start submitting that talk to big conferences which have a .NET track, and it never gets accepted.
Why? Because those conferences have people like Mads Torgersen, the actual lead designer of C# at Microsoft, on speed dial. If NDC Oslo or CraftConf or Yow! wants to fly somebody in to talk about what's new in C#, they can get the person who wrote those docs to do it.
Now, consider that talk was "how I used C# 13 to rebuild my smart home dashboard", or "how my team used C# 13 to save $5000 a month in AWS bills", or "I built an online game server using C# 13". Those kinds of talks do well because they have personality; there's more there than just the technology itself.
That's what I mean by "a story nobody else can tell" - it's a presentation that's anchored in the speaker's own real world experience; detail and context that hitherto only existed in their head.
I run presentation workshops for software professionals, and one of the things I ask my students to do is to come up with something - doesn't have to be tech-related - that they know better than anybody else in the group. We've had folks talk about how to cook ragu, how to surf on a longboard, how to get their kid to fall asleep ("literally nobody else in the world can do this, not even my wife"), and it is always remarkable to me how much more engaging and animated people become when they are telling their own story rather than paraphrasing research.
I had no idea. Thanks for spotting this; I've flipped the site over to use CloudFlare Full/strict TLS; if that doesn't work I can turn off CloudFlare proxying completely.
The song that I think would compile with the fewest changes to the language spec is Scorpions' "Rock You Like A Hurricane". I don't think it'd reveal any hidden meaning or anything, though... it's really just a long list of assignment statements. You need to spell 'Night' on line 2 with a capital 'N'; same with 'What' on line 4, and some liberal use of parentheses, but the first four lines do actually compile:
It's early morning, the sun comes out
Last Night was shaking and pretty loud
My cat is purring, it scratches my skin
So What is wrong (with another sin)?
The rest is, um, work in progress. And it may not be a coincidence that the stack push/pop operators in Rockstar are called "rock" and "roll", and the syntax was designed so that "rock you like a hurricane" is syntactically valid Rockstar code.
The songs would not have to do anything useful, the important point is that they are syntactically valid.
Compare "Black Perl": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Perl
(It was posted anonymously, but I remember reading somewhere Larry Wall has later admitted to being the author. Wikipedia claims authorship is still unclear, though.)
One of the reasons we're keen to do this - or at least to try it! - is that both the industry and Microsoft have changed enormously in the last ten years. There's a much richer range of platforms available, and there's all sorts of new protocols and patterns we can use to integrate those platforms - and with stuff like containerization and serverless cloud functions, there's all kinds of interesting ways to use .NET and .NET Core as part of a larger heterogenous application stack.
It will also be interesting - in the widest possible sense of the word - to see how the interactions between altnet and 2017-era Microsoft play out as compared to the 2007-era Microsoft. As the saying goes, watch this space :)
There's a group of us specifically talking about running another big alt.net 'unconference' here in the UK, but we're also keen to rekindle wider interest in the whole open source .NET ecosystem, and the kind of ideas that fuelled the first wave of alt.NET. For now we've got people posting their own things and we're using Medium (https://medium.com/altdotnet) as an aggregator, but nobody owns this; there's no trademarks or anything. If you want to kickstart something in your own community, go for it. We're going to be talking to other community groups and some of the extant alt.NET meetups that are still running, and share their ideas about community engagement, how to promote diversity and inspire enthusiasm, that kind of thing.
And it's great to see such a positive reaction. Thank you :)
