Overview
Organized by Bruce Eckel
March 3-7 2025
(Formerly The Java Posse Roundup)
Price: $750 Register Here
We are now holding the conference in the beautiful Center for The Arts, including the evening lightning talks/hackathon day presentations. The opening session and the evening sessions will be in the King Community Room (top floor, north end).
When scheduling, please note that there are events the evening of the 2nd and the morning of the 8th.
If you’ve previously attended any Crested Butte events and need a break on the fee, make a request. Don’t let the fee be the reason you can’t attend.
I wanted to let you know how much I thoroughly enjoyed the week I spent in Crested Butte for the WTF conference. Thanks for helping to organize such a wonderful conference and bringing together such a great group of people. It was exciting to see how a group left unto themselves, can self organise and set out on a meaningful course. This spirit of the event really resonated with me and I’m looking forward to continuing this journey thoughout the year. – Will Mooney
The WTF took me to places I never imagined I would go; intellectually, emotionally, career-wise, and geographically. The power of this tiny thing is immeasurable. – Andrew Harmel-Law, Tech Principal at ThoughtWorks, Author of Facilitating Software Architecture
I’m still stunned by how impactful WTF is … each year I walk away with a sense of knowing what I need to focus on that will help make an impact on my team and our projects. – Matt Brandt, Mozilla
The roundup has been the best and most transformative conference of my life, by far. It’s directly responsible for getting me where I am. – Joe Sondow
In my experience, the open-spaces forums that Bruce has facilitated have been a great source of new ideas, new friends in the tech world, and a fresh source of inspiration and energy I could apply to my regular work. – Joel Neely
Dianne Marsh’s Summary of the 2016 WTF
Welcome to the Winter Tech Forum!
Most people find this the best—and most unusual—conference experience of their life. The reason? Connection and participation.
We don’t have lectures. We create discussions. If there’s something you want to talk about, other people probably want to talk about it too. Put it on the board!
Sound crazy? Can’t possibly work? We’ve been doing events like this for 25 years, and the most common (and best) complaint we get is, “I can’t go to all the sessions!”
We also call it a retreat. Afternoons are for going outside, or just relaxing. Afternoon workshops spontaneously form, usually to explore a technology. People go out to lunch and dinner together or make meals in the rental houses. We have evening activities: lightning talks, hackday presentations, the popular progressive dinner, and the Friday banquet. There are games in the rental houses, and spontaneous conversations always happen. From waking to falling into bed, you are only bored if you want to be.
Sound exhausting? Most people come away recharged. That’s our aim, that you leave full of energy!
Understanding the Conference
We do our best to provide information via two primary sources:
If you can’t find the information on the web site, ask on Slack; It’s full of friendly folks who have attended before. Slack is also where we communicate during the conference, for pretty much everything. If you can’t get the answers you need, you can always reply to this email or email us.