Those of you familiar with the annual Game Developers Conference are undoubtedly also familiar with that conference’s notoriously unusable official website. For instance, you might ask yourself… “Hm, what session should I go to on Thursday afternoon?” and find yourself stumped by the fact that the date/time fields are conspicuously absent from the list of “All Sessions” leaving you with a very limited set of options to resolve your query:
- Open up each individual session you’re interested in and manually build a schedule grid for yourself
- Wait for the day of the conference and consult the “big board” on site
- Go through the “secret” (i.e. difficult to find) “printer friendly” link on the GDC website, which does include start times but which doesn’t appear to let you sort by them
Having had quite enough of this foolishness, I decided to scrape the “printer friendly” version into an Excel doc and sort it by date. After working around a few script errors in their exporter (i.e. it crashed on every instance of a quotation mark) I was able to create a pretty clean and usable version of the schedule. Currently it’s sorted by “Start Time” but you can feel free to re-sort on any column you like. Hope this proves helpful & I’ll see you at the GDC!
