yakxxx

You don't have to meet in-person to remain friends. Dropping few lines on FB/email every couple weeks will make big difference.

Try it and you will be surprised how positively people react to simple "Hey, how are you doing?".

Is it only me who finds inviting women to be speakers only because they are women wrong and in fact sexist? You shouldn't differentiate people like this.

It's basically wrong in the same way as saying "Im looking for white, heterosexual men who want to speak about Python"

I only reply because this guy points his finger at Poland and some of his points are clearly wrong:

- flight to Warsaw from Dublin costs about 200 euro and lasts 3 hours so he can see plenty of developers face to face and go back same day.

- time difference is 1 hour... don't see a big problem here

- don't know what teams he has experience with but in terms of talented developers let's check TopCoder ranking. Poland on 3rd place while UK on 20th...

- he mentions problem with checking references but if team is outsourcing to another countries they should have references in those countries, right?