Ask HN: What would attract you to attend a 1day course on a tech of your choice?

Instead, show us things hands-on, where being able to interact directly with each other and the instructor matters - let people ask questions, speed up the course if we are getting fast, slow down when questions come up, and don't let one slow person or one fast person ruin the pacing for the rest of the group.

I'm not sure exactly what that would look like, but I'd think hard about why being in-person matters, and construct the day accordingly.

Networking opportunities.

Extremely good catering.

Free items such as pens, notepads and novel and niche items that are hard to come by.

Some kind of “certificate” to prove I attended that I can put in my continual professional development portfolio so that if I get audited by the council that issues my certificate to practice I can show I’ve done some learning stuff.

Being actually really relevant learning (ie, new technology that actually is a game changer - replaces old technology that has become outdated).

Having the opportunity to do something really cool that you cannot do under normal circumstance.

(2) Opportunity for good in-person networking with industry professionals. This is what sets an in-person event apart from online learning.

(3) The opportunity to "finish a project" using the new tech, perhaps earn a cert, perhaps through free one-month membership into some expensive platform.

I attended a recent half-day tech course on a FAANG campus recently. Much of our time was spent creating various online accounts and doing other setup and configuration, which could easily have been done as "pre-work" at home. Other than the pizza, it was a sub-optimal day.

No noobs allowed. You must be experienced and bring something you’re actively working on that is commercially viable (not some side project).

For example I work with some hairy Postgres stuff. I’d love a day with people who are god tier in regards to their Postgres knowledge and databases in general to help me with my specific questions.

I don’t want to be in the room with bootcamp devs or people who don’t know sql or some lame shit like that. I want to be in a room of experts who want to interface with a god tier expert and learn.

I’d also find it cool to be with other pros and learn what problems they’re facing or solving.

Probably don’t.

Unless you have a lot of experience and then you probably would not.

Meet people’s expectations. They are the customers. Sure it is fine to exceed them. Here, that means they learn more, have a better time, and the pizza and coffee are above average.

Nobody builds a good reputation all at once.

Good luck.

That said, I still probably wouldn't want to spend a whole day + significant travel expenses just to learn D3 :( It's the kind of thing that's not very efficient to learn in a classroom, IMO.

I'd prefer a lot of examples with good documentation, not a classroom where you spend an hour getting everyone set up with a basic IDE just to get a single circle drawn on the screen. The pacing of such a class would likely vary too much between students, depending on their JS and visualization experience, and it's not a good use of time in a professional setting.

If I had to go to a workshop like this (or if work was paying for it), I'd at a minimum hope that there are different tracks/curricula, like one for boot camp beginners and another for professional devs with some industry experience. I don't know how you'd do it for beginners (I probably wouldn't start with d3 in that case).

As a working dev, I'd really want something that exposes me to experts in the field working on complex projects that have undocumented or non-obvious "gotchas". I don't want to sit in a room listening to someone talk about something I could've learned in 5 minutes of reading the docs. I'd want expert wisdom, like actual firsthand extensive experience using D3 in the wild and the resultant experience. Something like "Here's one project we did. We chose D3 because of X, and we used these specific visualizations because of Y and Z. It turns out our first attempts failed and confused people, so we ended up doing A and B instead, and had to solve for problem C that the docs don't mention at all." etc. In other words, real-world problems and real-world workflows.

I also think a real-world Q&A would be helpful, if you're able to collect questions (and ideally code samples) from participants beforehand and then go through them live for the entire audience to learn from. Like "We got a question about using a treemap interactions on mobile, and this was the demo we got. I thought about it and tweaked it like this..." or "how do you do a good heatmap with accessibility considerations for colorblind users?" etc.

At the end of the day, I think some live coding time with no required pre-set agenda, but available 1:1 time with instructor(s), would be helpful. Like people could bring their own projects they're working on, or tweak an example you provide (ideally in some easily cloneable environment / web IDE that doesn't waste time on pipeline setup), but have experts on hand to provide guidance. Or if not, they can just leave the workshop early or mingle in the break area or whatever.

Hope that doesn't seem overly negative... was just trying to be honest about what would get me excited to attend such a workshop. I guess the TLDR of it is that I'd prefer it to be more able "sharing expertise from real-world professional usage" rather than "here's how you make a bar chart".