> 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?
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