One of the ways I like to study the gospel is through General Conference. The talks are often based on the scriptures, but the focus is usually on applying the gospel in our day-to-day lives. Because the greatest value lies in studying the most recent words of the prophets and apostles, I had been reading a talk a day from the latest conference. I didn’t enjoy reading the talks in the same order over and over, and I wanted a way to incorporate older talks in a way that didn’t overshadow the newer ones.
I wrote a compute program that will give me a list of talks to study. I broke the six months between conferences into three distinct period. During each period, I want to study each talk from the latest conference once and fill in the rest of the days with older talks. Since my database goes back to 1970 and I still prefer newer talks, I used a weighted random number generator where the each conference is twice as likely to be selected as the one before it. I then shuffle these lists and print out a plan.
I figured other people might find such a program useful, so I released the code on GitHub with an open source license. But I also recognized that plenty of people would want to have such a plan through a website. So I hooked the program up to webserver and created a website at http://conference.burnhamup.com (source on GitHub). The website still needs some design work; I’m not sure what I want it to look like yet. I’m hoping to pretty it up in time for the April General Conference and hope that some people find it useful.