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.
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 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.
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?
Remember that there are only so many businesses (including non-profits) in town that want to rent the place. When people are coming from out of town what difference does the town make? Thus it is hard to fill your conference center.
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.
This is NOT confined to software conferences. I have been to semiconductor conferences and injection molding conferences and the phenomenon is the same.
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?
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.
> 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?
An added bonus to strictly attending local conferences is less harmful emissions from frivolous air travel.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And if I read a dozen node.js books a year, that would be fine. But if I just want to read the one or two Rust books coming out per year... it is not such a good value.
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. :(
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.
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...
(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.
Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
