Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences • Hacker News Board

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#11

Post by hinkley » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:09 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#12

Post by ghaff » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:12 PM UTC

draw_down wrote: post #3

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 tal…

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#13

Post by duxup » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:16 PM UTC

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #7

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…

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#14

Post by Retric » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #8

driverdan wrote: post #6

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.

It's tough. 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 spend…

It’s the same issue as sports stadiums, once local governments frequently subsidies something it stops being a competitive market with healthy profit margins.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#15

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:21 PM UTC

wronglebowski wrote: post #5

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?

Hashiconf (if you're using their tooling). Incredibly informative and always well put together.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#16

Post by duxup » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:22 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #6

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.

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#17

Post by ChrisMarshallNY » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:33 PM UTC

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#18

Post by ansible » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:37 PM UTC

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.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#19

Post by ghaff » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:44 PM UTC

duxup wrote: post #13

jonahhorowitz wrote: post #7

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…

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…

That's often how unconference formats work for at least part of the day. Unconferences seem to have fallen a bit out of fashion although AFAIK DevOps Days typically combine some curated main stage talks with smaller unconference facilitated discussions. I haven't been to one for a while though.

Re: Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

#20

Post by CapmCrackaWaka » Wed, Mar 25, 2020, 6:45 PM UTC

driverdan wrote: post #6

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.