The best conferences I had are the ones I barely attended any talks in them. Mostly because I met some very interesting people outside and the discussions/debates were more interesting, I've made some great friendships there. My worst was actually a Droidcon, where most the talks were a word-by-word repeated versions I already saw on Youtube.
How did you go about finding people to talk to?
There was this group that were louder and generally "more alive" than the rest. So I approached them, and lurked for a while, after a few minutes I said hi and introduced myself, and that's it!
After that I threw myself out of my comfort zone at every event. My goal was to meet as many interesting people as I could, and I did.
I was young back then, probably one of the youngest at those kind of events (that probably helped).