
Ask HN: What are the best developer conferences in 2016? - jakemor
What are everyone&#x27;s favorite conferences to attend?<p>I had a blast at WWDC15, although its the first conference I&#x27;ve been to so I don&#x27;t have much to compare to. The talks were very informative and I&#x27;m an iOS nerd so I was in heaven :)<p>How is F8? Google I&#x2F;O? Any other lesser known ones?
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dennyabraham
I try to find people whose talks I enjoyed in the past and check their
speaking schedule on lanyrd. I then cross reference that with cities I'd like
to visit, topics that will get me passionate, and other good quality speakers.
I find since I've been doing this, my joy vs exhaustion ratio of
conferencegoing has risen dramaticaly

~~~
jakemor
Lanyrd seems like a great resource. Bookmarked !

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jMyles
Here's a gathering that nobody has mentioned: Porcupine Festival in New
Hampshire. It's not a "developer conference" per se, but there are very solid
tech talks there. It probably has a more dense schedule of events than a
typical tech conference, but it has a lot of material that might be considered
"off topic" at a tech conference, such as political theory, practical tips for
living freely (gardening, handing police encounters, etc), and, of course, a
giant bonfire.

There _are_ also really wonderful tech talks, and this has pretty much become
the focus of the event. In addition to dev talks - which range in topic from
crypto to mesh networking to solar power monitoring - there's also material on
3D printing, drones, beer brewing automation, high-tech gunsmithing, and radio
communication.

There's also a beer exchange cum key-signing party which has become a
hillariously awesome tradition.

It's great fun and a great place to learn things you didn't know you wanted to
learn.

Other than Porcupine Festival, I'll also echo other people's suggestion to
attend PyCon. It's more of a cultural event than a dev conference per se, but
it's a really great gathering. And being in Portland, it's surely going to be
quite a party.

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noname123
Sry about hijacking the thread, but tbh, I don't have fun in any niche-tech
stack conference (e.g., Scala conference, PyCon, generic startup competition
hackathon), does anyone have recommendations for the most subversive tech
conferences?

e.g., DEFCON, Chaos Communication Congress, HOPE or Demoparties from the
DemoScene or BioHacking conferences?

~~~
robert_foss
CCC for sure. There is no other conference like it.

~~~
Zolomon
I concur. 30C3 to 32C3 were immense learning experiences, videos from the
conferences can be found on youtube.

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saryant
LambdaConf in Boulder was fantastic last year. Covers all manner of functional
programming topics. 3 days in late May.

[http://lambdaconf.us/](http://lambdaconf.us/)

~~~
rubiquity
Missed it last year and looks like I'll be missing it this year again. Bummer.
I've only heard great things.

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SyneRyder
Gratuitous plug, but I've been maintaining a haphazard list of conferences at
my Indie Conference [1] site. It focuses on bootstrapped / indie developers &
digital nomad types, but there's lots of developer conferences listed there.

If you're an iOS nerd, you might like these conferences:

Yosemite (March, USA):
[http://cocoaconf.com/yosemite/](http://cocoaconf.com/yosemite/)

NSNorth (April, Canada): [http://nsnorth.ca](http://nsnorth.ca)

UIKonf (May, Germany): [http://www.uikonf.com](http://www.uikonf.com)

360iDev (August, USA): [http://360idev.com](http://360idev.com)

iOS Dev UK (September, Wales):
[http://www.iosdevuk.com](http://www.iosdevuk.com)

Release Notes (September, USA):
[http://releasenotes.tv/conference/](http://releasenotes.tv/conference/)

Cocoa Love (October, USA): [http://cocoalove.org](http://cocoalove.org)

[1] [http://www.indieconference.com/](http://www.indieconference.com/)

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cperciva
BSDCan ([http://www.bsdcan.org/](http://www.bsdcan.org/)) is always good, and
incredibly cheap compared to most technical conferences.

~~~
jlgaddis
I've been to tons of conferences over the years but the recent vBSDcon was the
first BSD-centric conference I've attended. I've watched a number of videos of
talks from past BSDCan conferences and I am very strongly considering
attending in 2016.

~~~
cperciva
There are quite a few North American BSD conferences now (BSDCan, NYCBSDCon,
MeetBSD, vBSDcon) but BSDCan has been around for the longest and is the
largest of them -- last year we had 40 main talks, plus 6 BoFs, 5 short public
talks from the FreeBSD vendor summit, and 4 tutorials. vBSDCon had somewhere
around a dozen talks in total, I think.

Also, Ottawa is a great place to visit in June. I wouldn't want to visit in
the winter, but the May/June weather is very pleasant.

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lucisferre
We run a small-ish (~300 people) un-conference every year in Vancouver, BC
that has been going strong for the past 4 years. If you are looking for
something a little more spontaneous and less polished where you can really
engage with the software community and something that isn't centered around a
particular language, framework or company then it is worth a look. Also it is
inexpensive, thanks in part to being an un-conference and in larger part to
great sponsors.

[http://www.polyglotconf.com/](http://www.polyglotconf.com/)

The 2016 conference details will be announced shortly in the new year.

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idlewords
Have to give it up for Webstock
([http://www.webstock.org.nz/16/](http://www.webstock.org.nz/16/)) and Beyond
Tellerrand ([http://beyondtellerrand.com](http://beyondtellerrand.com)), which
are more towards the design/culture of tech side but consistently great.

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SSilver2k2
If you like Python, PyCon is always a blast. This year it's going to be in
Portland.

~~~
rch
Also, SciPy 2016 is scheduled for July 11-17 (same location [as 2015], AT&T
conference center, Austin)

Austin, TX, July 6-11, 2015

The site is down at the moment though:
[https://twitter.com/dpinte/status/663650024191037441](https://twitter.com/dpinte/status/663650024191037441)

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rabidonrails
Not as much an actual language/dev conference, but I'm excited to go to
Microconf, billed as "The Conference for Self Funded Startups."

[http://microconf.com](http://microconf.com)

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scrollaway
Last year's React-Europe was one of the better conferences I attended (save
for bad climatisation, which I hear is not a problem for this year). It's also
fairly small for how interesting it is; highly recommended.

[https://www.react-europe.org/](https://www.react-europe.org/)

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zlatan_todoric
[DebConf16]([http://debconf16.debconf.org/](http://debconf16.debconf.org/))
but that is for Debian geeks and general FLOSS hackers :)

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JoachimSchipper
Academic conferences in a relevant field can be very interesting, and are
often much cheaper than industry events. (You'll need to find some practical-
enough conferences, and you'll need to somehow pick up the required vocabulary
and concepts.)

Speaking for my own field, Real-World Cryptography should be mostly
understandable (and entertaining) to a programmer and enthousiast
cryptographer. (CHES and EUROCRYPT are also very interesting, but require a
lot more background.)

(Also consider e.g. ACM, Usenix, and any local interest/user groups.)

~~~
chrisseaton
ECOOP (European programming languages and systems conference) has a co-located
industry/academic overlap conference called Curry On

It's in Rome in July

~~~
seanmcdirmid
Another vote for Curry On. It has a strangeloop vibe.

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rch
The 2016 USENIX Annual Technical Conference

June 22-24, 2016 - Denver, CO

[https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16](https://www.usenix.org/conference/atc16)

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cies
Celebrate the /joy/ of coding June 17th in Rotterdam, the Netherlands at:

[http://joyofcoding.org](http://joyofcoding.org)

If you live near by and want to do deliver a short talk or lead a workshop,
have a look at the Call For Sessions.

Video from last year:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI2yOM4tODw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI2yOM4tODw)

Disclaimer: I'm co-organizing this event.

~~~
noelwelsh
Conf looks interesting! I'm considering submitting to it. Please note the
light-blue-on-white text of the speaker bios is unreadable to me. Perhaps this
could be tweaked?

~~~
cies
Thanks! Yes, we got the website out in a bit of a rush. I hope to find some
time to fix that (and several other outstanding issues). Looking fwd to your
submission!

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mindcrash
If you're language agnostic when it comes to programming the "nordic"
conferences are pretty damn awesome. Meaning:

GOTO conferences (Copenhagen, but also London, Berlin, Chicago and Amsterdam
nowadays) - [http://gotocon.com/](http://gotocon.com/) Recorded talks:
[https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences](https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences)

NDC (Originally Oslo, now also in London and "somewhere in Australia") -
[http://ndcoslo.com/](http://ndcoslo.com/), [http://ndc-
london.com/](http://ndc-london.com/) Recorded talks:
[https://vimeo.com/ndcconferences](https://vimeo.com/ndcconferences)

OreDev (Malmo, Sweden) - [http://oredev.org/](http://oredev.org/) Also has
links to recorded talks

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rubiquity
Strange Loop[0] is the go to multi programming language paradigm in my
opinion. It's held in St Louis, Missouri every year and features some of the
very best speakers in the domain of programming language design, theory and
computer science.

0 - [http://www.thestrangeloop.com/](http://www.thestrangeloop.com/)

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lmcnish14
I've been to a few across the US and my favorites so far have both been in
Colorado:

Develop Denver - [https://developdenver.org/](https://developdenver.org/)

Rocky Mountain Ruby - [http://rockymtnruby.com/](http://rockymtnruby.com/)

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nzoschke
AWS re:Invent is rad.

The sheer size of vendors and attendees is staggering. They keynotes are
polished and generally reveal exciting things. The tech talks are numerous and
sorted into 100, 200, 300 and 400 tracks based on how technical they are.

If you're building stuff on or for AWS you won't go home without learning
something new.

~~~
eropple
Yeah, this is the one I came here to post. re:Invent is a fantastic technical
resource that's largely available after the fact, but (I am told, I'm going
for the first time this year) the in-person stuff and the networking
opportunities seem to be the biggest reason to go.

~~~
curun1r
re:Invent is fun, but I find the sessions to be basically useless. Most of
them are very superficial and don't give you much that you couldn't glean from
a half hour looking a documentation. The most valuable thing is the
conversations you have with other attendees and, in particular, Amazon
engineers. Make sure you come with a list of specific questions you want
answered.

One thing I've learned from my first 2 re:Invents...skip the provided
breakfasts and lunches. They're terrible and I've gotten sick from them in
both of the years that I've attended. The other options at the
Venetian/Palazzo are well worth the extra cost.

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vizzini
2 UK options –

For front-end stuff: [http://2016.render-conf.com/](http://2016.render-
conf.com/)

For people who lead tech teams:
[http://2016.theleaddeveloper.com/](http://2016.theleaddeveloper.com/)

Disclosure: I help run them ;)

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jupp0r
If you are into subversive, I don't think you'd find anyone who doesn't love
Chaos Communication Congress ([https://events.ccc.de](https://events.ccc.de)).

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slyall
I'm a regular at Linux.conf.au (Feb, Australia):
[http://linux.conf.au/](http://linux.conf.au/)

It is mostly Linux but a lot of other related stuff gets in.

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solomatov
It highly depends on what you want. If you want some general high quality
overview of what happened over the year, I recommend GOTO or QCon. These are
great events.

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haidrali
RailsConf 2016 in Kansas City, MO, USA
[http://railsconf.com/](http://railsconf.com/)

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mavelikara
Monitorama, the open source monitoring tools conference. I have only attended
the 2015 edition in Portland, but I had a great time.

~~~
rubiquity
Same here. Monitorama is excellent. 2015 is my first but I plan on going every
year. Incredibly great talent. I felt like the most stupid person in the room
and walked away with all sorts of brain hurting growth.

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josh_carterPDX
Signal: [https://www.twilio.com/signal](https://www.twilio.com/signal)

~~~
biot
Is Signal a good, generic conference? I keep getting Twilio's emails about it
but have never considered going as it seems about as interesting as a Google
Maps API conference, ie: only focusing on using one company's very specific
product family. That said, if you're doing anything telephony or messaging-
related, it would be a good one for sure.

~~~
josh_carterPDX
True. It's more centered around communications, but with Twilio expanding
their product line recently (Video, IP Messaging, etc) I would think this is
going to become more general. Last year it was a great conference and I'm sure
it's just going to get better.

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freshrap6
I'm a big fan of the ACCU conference. It's not too big, but packed with lots
of good talks.

[http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016](http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016)

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sakopov
KCDC - June 22-24th in Kansas City, MO

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MichaelMoser123
I like to watch the talks on CPPCon on youtube (never attended it though);
seems to be a very interesting conference.

[https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon/videos](https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon/videos)

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binoyxj
AT&T Developer Summit & Hackathon 2016 is happening right now at Las Vegas,
Nevada [https://devsummit.att.com/](https://devsummit.att.com/)

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thisone
I haven't been to these, but I've been eyeing up
[http://gotocon.com/](http://gotocon.com/) recently

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ofcapl_
PolyConf maybe? [http://polyconf.com/](http://polyconf.com/)

I've heard very good reviews about previous editions.

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calibraxis
You may enjoy Strange Loop:
[http://www.thestrangeloop.com/](http://www.thestrangeloop.com/)

Videos:
[https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_QIfHvN9auy2CoOdSfMWDw](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_QIfHvN9auy2CoOdSfMWDw)

~~~
krat0sprakhar
Why has this been downvoted? I've heard great things about Strange Loop.

~~~
forgottenpass
_Why has this been downvoted? I 've heard great things about Strange Loop._

Christmas dinner at the Programmer family's house has been tough this year.
Logan was able to make the trip back home from San Fransisco, but is insistent
on picking political fights with Grandpa. Mom and Dad keep asking everyone not
to focus on politics for the day but Logan yells and calls them just as bad
for trying to creating an environment where people with options Logan doesn't
like can just sit there and eat ham.

Jake and I started day drinking before presents and are itching to slip away.
Wanna go sledding down behind The Academy?

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emXdem
uberconf was pretty sweet in 2015

