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.
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.
I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them.
Other people should go but they can't get the money.
Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.
A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.
However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?
I remember having to justify (if my boss was kidding, he's not good at jokes) a $3k ticket for JavaOne several times.
Both times I came back with a handful of tidbits that would have saved either myself or an entire team weeks of frustrating debugging or research work. So yeah, you got your money's worth.
There's a weird sort of what I feel like is sort of skewed psudo world of conferences that don't fit right in line with ... what I do even if the topic of the conference is right on target.
Conference speakers have some patterns of topics and they're useful and I appreciate them, but they often touch on some topics / have their own way of looking at things.
Other speakers seem to be all about spelling out a laundry list of platitudes topics that are even more disconnected ... I appreciate those less.
Sales pitches ... not interested.
Not to say they're useless but there are a huge variety of workplaces, developers, and all sorts of things that work differently, and conferences tend to be very focused on their general POV about how things work and are done.
I'm not sure I worded anything right but the conference culture always seems a bit 'off' for me.
Every word you said is true. Yet you entirely missed the point of O'Reilly conferences.
> Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.
It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe.
This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since around 2000. They also had about 10 simultaneous tracks, which requires a large venue. That costs real money.
> They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.
Their prices are clearly posted on their registration pages, and they offer generous alumni discounts. And most IT people work for ... wait for it ... corporations.
> The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance.
Companies pay for those booths. If you don't like their pitch, you can ask for a technical contact to followup. Or not visit them.
Personally, I walked around to each booth and ask for an overview of their products and asked detailed questions, then blogged about it for others who couldn't make it to the conference.
So they are valuable, if you're in the right frame of mind.
> They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.
The larger sponsors have the chance to do a keynote. That's how it works. A small percentage of keynotes at O'Reilly conferences are outright sales pitches. The rest aren't. The most valuable ones I saw were the 451 Group market analyses of upcoming trends, which I wasn't expecting to be valuable initially.
Ironically, I heard the most complaints about a keynote delivered by a world expert on HA from VMware - the problem wasn't the talk, the problem was he was a decade ahead of most of the attendees. lol.
The Percona Conference does it right: they have a track with a dedicated room for vendor-sponsored talks. So everybody knows what to expect before sitting down. Yet they still get plenty of attendees.
> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.
Or, you know, you could just go to a bar. But I'm sure you would gripe about the wallpaper color they chose, right?
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.
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.
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.
Content quality has also fallen off a cliff somewhere along the way (is Mt. Everest a cliff? I'm going to say yes). Tons of shovelware-equivalents filled with flaws and never being corrected even with years of errata submissions (I do however love that this is possible). And the video courses, oh boy those video courses...
In ye olden days they were a relatively reliable publisher. Now I won't even consider touching them unless I can find many reviews vouching for a book.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Ask for your employer to cut you a check for the cost it takes you to go to a conference, and spend it on some good headphones or earbuds, and a bidet.
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.
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.
driverdan|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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.
PaulHoule|6 years ago
I think some people get sent to conferences for the wrong reasons: the company has some money for some reason so they send them.
Other people should go but they can't get the money.
Many times the companies that get booths and sponsor the conference press a lot of flesh and get a lot of business cards but no sales. Sometimes you will see a conference sponsor smiling afterwards, but often they end up spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.
A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.
However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?
hinkley|6 years ago
Both times I came back with a handful of tidbits that would have saved either myself or an entire team weeks of frustrating debugging or research work. So yeah, you got your money's worth.
matchagaucho|6 years ago
Most people are there for the free swag, parties, and booze.
The sessions have increasingly sensationalized titles with hollow delivery.
The local hotels charge $500 night. Uber and Lyft drivers converge on Moscone center like bees to honey.
Local traffic in SF comes to a halt.
Sounds fun. Right?
duxup|6 years ago
Conference speakers have some patterns of topics and they're useful and I appreciate them, but they often touch on some topics / have their own way of looking at things.
Other speakers seem to be all about spelling out a laundry list of platitudes topics that are even more disconnected ... I appreciate those less.
Sales pitches ... not interested.
Not to say they're useless but there are a huge variety of workplaces, developers, and all sorts of things that work differently, and conferences tend to be very focused on their general POV about how things work and are done.
I'm not sure I worded anything right but the conference culture always seems a bit 'off' for me.
frandroid|6 years ago
redis_mlc|6 years ago
> Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.
It's not all about you, and you're not the center of the universe.
This isn't commonly known, but the O'Reilly Open Source Conference was specifically glitzy so the global press had a good experience broadcasting it, and promoting Open Source, since around 2000. They also had about 10 simultaneous tracks, which requires a large venue. That costs real money.
> They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship.
Their prices are clearly posted on their registration pages, and they offer generous alumni discounts. And most IT people work for ... wait for it ... corporations.
> The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance.
Companies pay for those booths. If you don't like their pitch, you can ask for a technical contact to followup. Or not visit them.
Personally, I walked around to each booth and ask for an overview of their products and asked detailed questions, then blogged about it for others who couldn't make it to the conference.
So they are valuable, if you're in the right frame of mind.
> They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.
The larger sponsors have the chance to do a keynote. That's how it works. A small percentage of keynotes at O'Reilly conferences are outright sales pitches. The rest aren't. The most valuable ones I saw were the 451 Group market analyses of upcoming trends, which I wasn't expecting to be valuable initially.
Ironically, I heard the most complaints about a keynote delivered by a world expert on HA from VMware - the problem wasn't the talk, the problem was he was a decade ahead of most of the attendees. lol.
The Percona Conference does it right: they have a track with a dedicated room for vendor-sponsored talks. So everybody knows what to expect before sitting down. Yet they still get plenty of attendees.
> If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.
Or, you know, you could just go to a bar. But I'm sure you would gripe about the wallpaper color they chose, right?
pengaru|6 years ago
An added bonus to strictly attending local conferences is less harmful emissions from frivolous air travel.
aguyfromnb|6 years ago
I think that's mostly their point. It's a getaway "perk" for office drones.
Conferences are fun to attend once a year, but personally I never did much "business" at them. It was a work vacation. YMMV.
jonahhorowitz|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
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.
ansible|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
Groxx|6 years ago
In ye olden days they were a relatively reliable publisher. Now I won't even consider touching them unless I can find many reviews vouching for a book.
ryansmccoy|6 years ago
unethical_ban|6 years ago
jedberg|6 years ago
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. :(
hinkley|6 years ago
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.
sybercecurity|6 years ago
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...
jhbadger|6 years ago
alaxsxaq|6 years ago
ghaff|6 years ago
(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.
donretag|6 years ago
Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.
ghaff|6 years ago
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.
wenc|6 years ago
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).
frost_knight|6 years ago
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.
chirau|6 years ago
ChrisMarshallNY|6 years ago
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.
wronglebowski|6 years ago
zerkten|6 years ago
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.
sciurus|6 years ago
https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5
jonahhorowitz|6 years ago
toomuchtodo|6 years ago
DonHopkins|6 years ago
draw_down|6 years ago
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|6 years ago
saystupidthings|6 years ago
[deleted]
itqwertz|6 years ago