Is there a conference for everything nowadays? I mean with the digital conference it's not really going to happen, but didn't some companies declare bankruptcy because they kept pouring all their money and effort into conferences?
I like niche conferences, especially more-so if you're part of the group! I've been using vim for my entire career and neovim since around v0.2.
One of vim/neovim conferences (forgot which one) I was introduce to one of my favorite plugins: harpoon [1]. I would have never learned about this plugin if it wasn't for these types conferences.
If it's called VimConf, I could understand including content from anything vim related, even vi or neovim stuff (or from the other forks/variations/bases).
But if it's called NeovimConf, I wouldn't expect that to include the entire Vi ecosystem.
That will be changing soon. Vim 9 has a new version of Vimscript (called Vim9script) which Neovim doesn't support, and its APIs for things like async jobs are also different. However Vimscript itself will probably remain a common denominator for many years to come.
TJ DeVries (one of the Neovim contributors, and a frequent streamer) was working on some sort of vim9 translation support for Neovim. Seems more like a side project rather than something that will be built into Neovim, though.
Harpoon is really cool, especially if you only work with 3 to 4 files. The ability to switch files with two keys is extremely nice. It's just a very ergonomic and pleasant plugin to use.
You might already know this but niche conferences are part of some larger marketing strategies. Seeing conferences for a product can add legitimacy in the minds of people who are shopping for solutions. But over time I've realized there's more to it, almost an Inception-like quality to a lot of conference topics.
A company I worked for had a whole division dedicated to inventing conferences around products or ideas that other companies wanted to promote. A great example are conferences where there are talks on cloud-based tools. The speakers don't just go up there and say "go buy compute from vendor X". Instead, everything is structured around how to use (often free) tools or techniques that ultimately require investment in "compute or storage from vendor X".
Another, more abstract, example is a conference on programming languages or frameworks. These are great places to push ideas about "the new way" or "the right way" to do something that happen to include something you're selling. I've seen conferences make attendees into low-level developer evangelists. Those people went back to their companies to endorse programming languages and architectures that had a lot of support from particular vendors, and the cycle was complete. It may seem a bit hand-wavy the way I've explained it, but I've seen it work.
My point is, conferences may cost a lot to put on but have quite a few obscured benefits that you have to price in when considering if they're worth it.
Hell yeah. I've heard enough war stories from conference organizers to know that they'd really benefit from a small conference to share tips on running conferences.
The problem is that anyone who'd benefit from it would want to run it.
