The Next Week Phenomenon

There is a thing that I notice happening repeatedly with this conference organizing process. It's where I keep thinking something will come through next week and then it doesn't. Perhaps a bit naively/optimistically assume something will take one, maybe two, weeks. And it somehow turns into months. Usually it revolves around communication with busy people. This happened with the venue. It would take days to get a response from anyone and then if things needed to go back and forth that would stretch into weeks for a simple conversation that in person could have taken minutes. Technology has brought communication leaps and bounds but it also has put up some barriers.

Recently, I decided I needed to get some accounting/tax advice before I started talking with speakers or sponsors. I reached out to a couple people over the past 2 weeks and I still haven't talked with a single accountant. Some people haven't responded. Some say they will get back to me and haven't yet. I do understand. Everyone is busy and I am asking busy people to take time out of their day to help me. I am just trying to figure out if maybe I am going about this wrong.

This time I think I was trying too hard to be specific. I was asking around to see if there were accountants with specific knowledge in event organizing. I just need to find a good accounting firm and call them up. I don't think event organizing finances are too complicated, especially with a small event like mine. I guess I will know in a year whether this strategy works out or not. I'll keep you updated.

Tracking Sites

I have recently gotten bitten by the Claude Code bug and so when I didn't like any of the web analytics products out there I decided to build my own. It probably only took me an hour to have a first working version deployed (a rails app) and I have been tweaking it now and then for the past two weeks. It basically just shows me when, from where (geographically), and from whom (referrer) I am getting my traffic. My numbers aren't huge, but it is interesting to see where things are coming from. Most of my traffic comes from the United States (unsurprisingly). But a surprising thing is that I get more traffic from rubyconferences.org than I do from the various links I have peppered all over social media.