
Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences - Oculus
https://morningmindmeld.com/issues/pouring-one-out-for-the-end-of-o-reilly-s-in-person-conferences-232826
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driverdan
Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate
sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal
substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs
put on by local organizers.

~~~
CapmCrackaWaka
So many conferences are like that, even local ones. I just went to a
conference in Richmond, VA (RVATech Summit). The first keynote spent his
entire time selling his company, and barely mentioned machine learning. His
presentation was called "Building a Company around Machine Learning".

The year before, the head of machine learning at amazon spent his 45 mins
talking about the advantages of AWS over Azure. The more money someone manages
at these companies, the worse their presentation is going to be, in my
experience.

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vlod
I don't understand why more people don't just get up and leave. Yeah, it can
be perceived as being rude, but I view someone bait and switching me to listen
to a 45 min sales pitch as rude. If the majority of people did this
presenters/conference planners would get the point.

I _DO_ realize that some of these pay the bills so I give them 10 mins tops.
If you don't start talking about meat-and-potatoes after that, I'm outta
there.

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true_religion
Some people are interested in the sales pitch, especially if they can ask
questions directly afterwards.

For me, a lot of times I go to conferences about subjects I already have
expertise in, so it’s hit or miss if I can learn anything. So having a talk
about someone’s product or personal experience can be better than a lecture
over knowledge I already have.

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jonahhorowitz
I've been going to large conferences since I started my career 20 years ago.
When I was a junior engineer I found the sessions very informative, but as I
developed more experience, I always got the most value hanging out in the
hallway after sessions or the hotel bar at the end of the day.

I've tried "going to" a few virtual conferences and they're basically useless.
Losing these physical spaces to gather and discuss will be a huge blow to
learning and collaboration.

~~~
duxup
As a bit of a n00b (working in a small shop without a lot of exposure to other
processes and etc) going to meetups I find those are super handy conversations
/ the most valuable.

Even stuff like "I was trying to solve this problem but I saw this really
popular pattern and folks seemed to like it but damn it looks like it would
just blow up if you ever did X." And someone tells me "yeah that blew up for
me and here is how". So helpful!

I want a conference where folks get into small groups and everyone goes around
and says:

Here is what I'm doing, challenges we faced, how we overcame them, lessons
learned.

Even basic day to day stuff that someone talks about can be handy. The minuta
and stuff sometimes is the key it seems. And sometimes just sharing similar
stories / problems that don't have solutions for me inspires a lot of
confidence and that can lead to real results.

~~~
ghaff
That's often how unconference formats work for at least part of the day.
Unconferences seem to have fallen a bit out of fashion although AFAIK DevOps
Days typically combine some curated main stage talks with smaller unconference
facilitated discussions. I haven't been to one for a while though.

~~~
rutthenut
I've been to the last couple of London DevOpsDays and find the presentations
often interesting, but the ad hoc sessions in the afternoon can be some of the
best parts.

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ansible
This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by
O'Reilly's website these days?

I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual
ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor.

Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can
start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend
$500 USD per year on? What does O'Reilly actually have these days?

I'd prefer to save my free trial for when I'm moderately sure I'll want to
stick with the service. If I don't even have an index of what's being offered,
that really turns me away.

~~~
kod
Get an ACM membership. It includes full access to oreilly books.

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blub
You mean over Safari or as pdf?

~~~
kod
Safari

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jedberg
This is a huge blow to our industry I think. I've attended a lot of
conferences, large and small, and the hallway track is almost always the most
useful part.

I've had some of my most important collaborations start with meeting someone
in the hall.

I've met some of my best friends in conference hallways.

I have an entire group of friends who I only ever see at conferences, because
we live all over the world.

I once got questioned entering Canada as to why I was going and I said, "to
visit friends". They asked me how I could have so many friends in Canada if
I've lived in California all my life. I told them, "I met them all at
conferences!".

And it's true. Every person I know in Canada I met at a conference (other than
a few family members). And almost all of them have helped me professionally at
one time or another as well as being good friends.

I'm going to miss those O'Reilly hall tracks. :(

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hinkley
When I worked on the Mosaic project, I went into my boss's office one day and
his shelves had sprouted about 6 shelf-feet of O'Reilly books.

Somehow Terry convinced some O'Reilly rep that since we were helping them sell
so many books that maybe they should give us some free books. Turns out that
the entire catalog was 6 feet at that particular moment. So he had every.
single. O'Reilly book in print. I was not entirely gracious in my jealousy.

A couple times a year I am reminded of the comedians and speakers I heard as a
child talking about old things ending all the time, and it's been happening
more and more to me. The worst is still the "Guess who died game", but that's
so far about losing people I grew up with. As you can tell by the above, I
kind of grew up with O'Reilly, and I hope this isn't the end of an era.

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sybercecurity
Same with some standard development orgs as well like the IETF. The real value
is in the "hallway" meetings or pop up meetings organized over a particular
topic. Especially the IETF where they even admit the email list is where
official work is done and not really in-person meetings.

The use of collaboration tools like github/lab, wikis and mailing lists help a
bit. Maybe we need to give Second Life a second look...

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jhbadger
This sort of thing is true for scientific conferences as well -- that half the
point isn't the talks, but connecting with potential collaborators between (or
instead of) talks. With numerous conferences this year that haven't been
cancelled outright shifting to online, we'll have to see if any of this
networking aspect can be captured.

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alaxsxaq
I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in
the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they
moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the
content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in
Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming
disinterested in this event or there was a revenue problem. I guess a bit of
both.

~~~
ghaff
While the trigger was obvious, the way this came down makes one suspect that
the in-person events were, if not on the chopping block, at least somewhat
precarious. Remember also that it's not _just_ OSCON; O'Reilly had a big slate
of events.

(That a lot of people mostly equate OSCON with the O'Reilly events business is
likely a symptom of the overall problem. This isn't a commentary on the
quality of their events generally--which I've found to be pretty solid--but it
does say something about the mindshare they have beyond OSCON.)

And, if I'm being honest, OSCON has gone from being almost a must go if you
were in certain open source circles to something still mostly worth going to
if you could find the time and budget. OSCON out-survived a lot of shows that
were about open source overall but it's frankly a bit hard to be an event
about open source in a general way when open source touches almost everything.

In any case, in spite of the special place a lot of people have for OSCON, it
probably wasn't sustainable as a standalone event without the rest of the
event slate.

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donretag
Good riddance. They would purchase great conferences, like Hadoop World which
costed only $200 to attend, and turn them into $1500 affairs.

Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in
Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.

~~~
ghaff
LISA, SCALE, Supercomputing, Gluecon, local DevOps Days, etc.

The thing is that cheap conferences depend on either a company running it for
sales purposes (and mostly not then for big events) or volunteers providing
cheap labor--both of which limit the options. Volunteers mostly get tired of
running conferences when there are large commercial interests involved--as
happened with Hadoop.

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wenc
Developers conferences can be useful if you get to talk to the right people.

I was given a pass to Microsoft Build one year because we were looking to
build stuff on Azure but weren't sure which services were mature and which
were not. I talked to almost every single PM who had a booth there (and at MS,
PMs are also developers). I learned that if you push MS PMs hard enough and
ask the right questions, most will drop the marketing facade and give you the
insider's view. (after all, developers -- by personality trait -- generally
hate two-faced marketing talk and would genuinely rather talk about the tech)

This unfiltered insider's view is decidedly quite different from Microsoft's
enterprise marketing's messaging. Attending Microsoft Build and talking to PMs
helped us avoid investing our efforts in Azure services that turned out to be
dead-ends. (many of Azure's GA stuff are feature complete but not truly
production-ready) Short of running POCs, there exist few other low-effort
means of procuring this intelligence other than by talking to (honest) Azure
consultants at Meetups who have to deal with this stuff in daily production.

My conclusion from the conference (corroborated with my own dev experience)
was that the parts of Azure that were built on pre-existing Microsoft
technology (like VMs and SQL Servers) were generally solid and could be relied
upon.

Whereas many new-fangled PaaS/SaaS cloud-only offerings tend not to be as
battle-tested and would often fail on corner cases, so one would be prudent to
think twice about putting mission-critical workloads on them. Also, one learns
that despite the glossy marketing material, some Azure offerings turned to not
have had any dev activity on them due to low uptake. There are still maturity
issues in Azure today, and my gut feel is that most enterprises that do run on
Azure mostly use their IaaS (VMs, SQL) offerings -- these are the most mature
-- rather than their PaaS and SaaS offerings.

The common refrain from marketing folks is that cloud development is a moving
target, and what was true a week ago might not be true now (a trivially true
statement but of no practical use).

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frost_knight
This past February I had the honor of giving my first ever keynote
presentation. The conference was sponsored by my employer. That said, aside
from mentioning that I worked for said employer, I never mentioned it again
nor did I try to sell anyone anything.

I had some of the best most awesome conversations during the coffee and lunch
breaks. I can only hope that I gave a fraction of insight during my keynote
that I received during the hallway talks.

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chirau
I, for one, will surely miss the O'Reilly Conferences. Very well organized and
great keynote speakers. Also, you will meet a lot of interesting people in
hallways, dining, social events etc. It also gives you O'Reilly Online access.

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ChrisMarshallNY
I certainly agree about the "Hallway track." Nowadays, you can get more from a
session by reviewing the video, than from being there in person.

However, making relationships, and maintaining them, is really important. This
goes double for today's distributed teams; where people may seldom get a
chance to meet.

Never been to an O'Reilly conference, but have attended many others.

Nowadays, most conferences are too damn big and polished for me. My favorite
conference of all time, was MacHack, in the late 1980s. Really scruffy,
scrappy, and energizing.

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wronglebowski
I actually was planning to attend their DevOps conference this year before
COVID. My employer will sponsor one conference of my choice. Any
recommendations for replacements?

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zerkten
If your employer is paying, how much more runway do you have to make a
decision? Given the current situation, I'd expect many companies to start
cutting expenses and making excuses.

If there is a virtual training class rather than an online conference, I'd
make that a priority, if the funds may disappear.

As for replacement conferences, I wouldn't assume that you'll have any
certainty around those until those for some time.

~~~
ghaff
That's good advice. The general hope is that things start to ramp back up for
fall conference season though I'm not placing any big bets on that. A few
conferences are still holding to summer plans but IMO that's very iffy
especially if they're not at the very tail end.

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draw_down
I never got much out of the "hallway track", myself. For the parties and
socializing, I guess I prefer the company of people that don't tend to find
themselves at professional technology conferences.

If the talks don't have interesting ideas or expose me to new things, it's
hard for me to get value out of a conference. It's true that you can watch a
talk from anywhere, but being in the same room usually gives the talk deeper
and longer-term impact, I have found.

~~~
ghaff
For me, a lot of the value is "hallway track," meetings, etc. But I do also
find value in having some forced time to be exposed to new things. There are
lots of talks online about various topics but, to be honest, I don't get
around to watching a huge amount.

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itqwertz
Most conferences can be summed up in a group of blog posts. I don’t need to
listen to a Diversity Evangelist tell me how to code.

