Duplicating a comment I posted on a previous conference thread that is even more relevant here:
"... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers.
Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.
Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.
I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372)
I have never been to an academic conference where I have gotten anything from the talk that I couldn't have gotten from reading the paper. The advantage to a conference is that I have easy access to the author so that I can ask questions, discuss similar ideas or even just network. Non-academic conferences serve a similar purpose. Yes, you could just read a blog post. However, if you are looking to explore ideas with people that have an interesting way of thinking, or if you want to pick someone's brains, or if you just want to network, conferences are extremely useful. There are lots of people who do normal every day practical work that I would love to talk to. There is no need for the excuse to get together to be an academic talk.
This is a fair point. But I think, and this is a large generalisation, that the answers to questions at an academic conference will be far more in-depth and interesting than those at other confs.
Not only that, but the calibre of questions asked is likely to be higher, resulting in better answers too. If the answer could be given as a comment reply on an equally banal blogpost level talk, then was the ticket price really worth the opportunity to ask the question face-to-face? I'd pay money to ask the leading expert at x university in machine learning a question. The leading "expert" in ClownJS? Not so much.
> Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference.
I mean - this shouldn't come as a surprise. Any sufficiently large community is going to self-organize and attempt to be self-sustaining (there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name). I suspect your mental model of conferences infers too much decorum: there's a whole bunch of conferences for computer games, juggulos, furries, comics, "over-unity" energy, and anime. Why can't JS frameworks have thier own fandom?
"(there's a named law about this self-perpetuation, I forget the name)"
Pournelle's iron law of bureaucracy:
In any bureaucracy, the people devoted to the benefit of the bureaucracy itself always get in control and those dedicated to the goals the bureaucracy is supposed to accomplish have less and less influence, and sometimes are eliminated entirely.
I was particularly disappointed with re:Invent for this reason. Everything I attended could be found in blogs that had been published for years and very few "higher level" sessions that were still very trivial. Most of those weren't even discussions, just follow a lab sheet that you won't have time to finish or doesn't work at the time. I'm not sure if it was always this way, but the only people who seem to benefit at all are those in sales-oriented position. It is basically only good for meeting people and you may as well just skip all of the actual content to pursue that.
It was the first real conference I've attended (luckily not at my expense) and will likely be my last.
I worked as an AWS instructor (not for AWS directly, for one of the big technology training companies) a few years ago. Some of the other instructors had been to numerous re:invents and said that the two real reasons to go were:
re:Invent has gotten very large. And AWS, to their credit, is especially good at doing session videos. I haven't attended in a few years and, if I did, it would be for reasons other than attending sessions. (And, given the size and absent specific booth/meeting responsibilities, I see little reason to go.)
That said, I attend lots of events. But it's mostly for meeting with people and absorbing the general zeitgeist. Breakouts/booths are just the window dressing.
Personally, I think the main value of community tech conferences for attendees is exposure to ideas they wouldn't ordinarily be encouraged to sit through.
Agreed. Even if you are better served taking three days off and digging into blog posts, a small project, etc, on your own, how often do you do so? Do you feel like your employer would be cool with that?
One way I've seen this done is with hackathons, but they're uncommon enough to be notable whenever an employer supports them.
I've found that generalist conferences attract a lot of high-level "tech brand" fluff, while very specific conferences in the tech I use can teach me novel and useful deep-in-the-weeds knowledge. Other people's production war stories can be priceless.
Is it really? It doesn't comment on the article or its content in any way. (The same was true the first time you posted it, when it was also top comment and received plenty of discussion.)
I'm also not a huge fan in general, but it's a distinctly good method for getting feedback when building an API or product.
Let me tell you this story:
October 2019 we did something similar, but took it to the extreme: We created 8 conventions on 8 days in 8 major cities in Germany to learn more about private investors and our customers. Time-wise, almost no rational person would've invested so much time.
We talked to almost 1000 real and some prospective customers. The learnings were amazing. In the following 4 weeks, we managed to improve product and reduce churn by 3X (~24% to 6%), which is generally unheard of. It was one of the best ways ever to build up user empathy and understanding real, underlying needs as well as a ton of UX problems.
"... am I the only one that thinks there are... too many conferences? Sometimes it seems as if almost any new sufficiently large JS framework now has a conference. Slap the word "conf" or "con" on the end of whatever random noun you chose for your framework and boom, start sending out ticket invites and request for papers. Conferences were originally for leading experts in a particular field to share new research and present papers that were going to be published, and give people the chance to ask questions and find out more from the authors.
Conferences now feel more like a show and tell with blogpost level quality writing. Most non-academic conference talks I see could have been summarised easily in a blogpost and a few screenshots or at most a slide deck.
I recognise the networking aspect of them can be useful, but I couldn't justify spending the ticket price of some of them, to go to a conf based around one very narrow tech (unless it was a narrow but widely used and lucrative tech, and I was looking for work in that area currently)." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21874372)