The current state of technical conferences

9 Replies

Is anyone else feeling a little … disappointed or underwhelmed by technical conferences lately?

Even the smaller ones, the code camps and hackathons, feel a little lackluster to me. Maybe it’s because I see the same themes repeated over and over again at every technical gathering.

  • ElegantCoder

    what themes do you see?

    • http://lazycoder.com/ Scott Koon

      “getting started with x”
      “x in the enterprise”
      “what’s new with x version y”
      “do {magic thing} with x”
      “advanced {thing} with x” – ends up being very basic and not very advanced. “{funny, quirky, hip title that ends up being a getting started with x session} “tdd/unit testing with x” – devolves into a discussion of what is or isn’t a unit test. “{something with Git}” – ends up just being an example of pushing and pulling, never merging. {vendor demo disguised as a session where the presenter apologizes for past failings of the tool. Tool sometimes stops working during the session as well} {watch me configure my machine and the projector for 30 minutes}

      • ElegantCoder

        Ha! You are awesome man. And pretty much spot on.

      • Jessitron

        What would you like to see?

  • http://compositecode.com Adron

    Yup. I’ve felt that way at a number of them. However I chalk that up to my having been in the industry for a while now. Some of the conferences though are definitely picking up steam, having some good presentations, and are generally entertaining. However the good ones are far and few between.

    Personally, I’m working on resolving that to a degree.

  • jguadagno

    I think if you attend a lot of conference you see the same “themes”/presentations over and over again. Also, at a certain developers (MVP/Insiders/Microsoft Employees) see this stuff some many times that it can seem repetitive.

  • Donald Belcham

    Completely agree. Same content themes, same content levels. Unfortunately, the content levels are usually beginner to intermediate yet listed as intermediate to advanced.

  • Tom Opgenorth

    Depends on the community I suppose. I notice this more with .NET than say Ruby.  But then again I’ve much more experience with .NET than Ruby so perhaps this is a familiarity thing.

  • http://twitter.com/nitin Nitin Borwankar

    everything Scott Koon said with “and Big Data” added to it