This is NOT confined to software conferences. I have been to semiconductor conferences and injection molding conferences and the phenomenon is the same.
Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people. It’s for asking questions that are not part of the presentation, learning about something interesting someone is doing that’s not in some slides, or just bouncing off your own crazy ideas on a new audience.
IF they are videoed for offline. Not all conferences are high tech conferences.
> Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people.
Sure, but the injection molding conference I went to was a good example of "It really is about the speakers".
One of the speakers was the first one in North America to get one of the new Japanese 3-D metal printers which include a precision 3-D milling head in the envelope so that they can 3-D print injection molds with conformal cooling for prototype runs. So far, so normal--and not terribly useful to an electrical engineer.
However, he had a throwaway line that their previous solution was to use a Form 2, 3-D print an injection mold in the high-temp plastic, put that mold in an aluminum carrier, and inject 25-50 units before the plastic mold breaks down.
THAT got my attention on a LOT of different dimensions:
1) SLA was good enough for real work with a company doing injection molding whose time is money
2) SLA had good enough surface finish to do injection molding.
3) The high-temp resin was robust enough to hold up to a real injection molding machine
That simple throwaway line was THE nugget of the conference. We bought an SLA printer the next week and the thing hasn't been idle since.
Granted.
But my ability to effectively network is severely ablated when I've been de-energised by being bored out of my skull by crappy content.
Great content energises and sparks conversation. Bad content does the absolute opposite: it's exhausting and mindnumbing. It puts me in a mindset where what I want to do is not talk to people, but get away and get some fresh air.
> This is NOT confined to software conferences.
It's not confined to anything. This is a problem any time you want knowledge of any kind. Nobody in the past wrote a book thinking of you specifically having whatever problem in the future.
Consider Ben Waggoner's answer here: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-equivalent-of-the-names-of...
Imagine the question is "what were the Norse constellations?" (It's not the question originally asked, but it is the question being answered.) This is the type of thing that might have been formally documented. But if it was, all such documentation was lost. Instead, the knowledge is distributed through every cultural artifact ever produced by the Norse:
> Here's the thing. We do have some astronomical manuscripts written in Iceland, in Old Icelandic. However, they're translations of Greek or Latin works
> Most of these are found in Icelandic treatises on computus, the medieval art of reckoning the calendar and determining the dates of Christian holy days; these also contain some astronomical lore. But they're not useful guides to what the pre-Christian, pre-book culture Norse would have thought about the stars.
> Most of the constellation names are direct translations of the Latin names. Aquarius is Vatnkarl (“water-man”), Pisces is Fiskarnir (“the fish”)
> Some of the texts refer to constellations that I don't think are even visible from Iceland, such as Centaurus and Ara, so clearly they're not "native Norse" texts.
> And yet. . . every so often, one of these translations will slip something in that's not in the original.
>> Andromeda, daughter of Cepheus, wife of Perseus, sits in the Milk Ring [Milky Way], there where we say "wolf's jaws", in between Pisces and Cassiopeia and Aries
> And boom, there's a constellation name that has nothing to do with Greek mythology: in normalized spelling, úlfs kjöptr, "wolf's mouth" or "wolf's jaws."
If you want to answer this simple question ("What were the Norse constellations?"), you need to read... everything. We got lucky in this astronomical treatise -- it included information that wasn't supposed to be there. Epic poetry isn't unlikely to make some kind of reference to the stars. Maybe we could tease something out of a folk song. Maybe there's a picture somewhere with a caption on it. Maybe there's an ancient anthropological study of the Norse by some other culture, that happens to mention a constellation of theirs.
Everything is like this. Try studying any language independently and then sitting in on a class. It will either be mostly stuff you already knew, with stuff you didn't know scattered randomly through, or it will be mostly stuff you didn't know, with stuff you learned long ago scattered randomly through, presented as new and challenging. It probably is new and challenging -- to the students in the class, who have been through a curriculum designed to lead them to this one.
There is no way to make the world give you only information that you think is relevant, because "information you think is relevant" is a concept that only exists in your mind.
