21–30 of 69 posts
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 pe…
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 pe…
They don't sell ebooks anymore?
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 m…
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 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?
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.
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.
An added bonus to strictly attending local conferences is less harmful emissions from frivolous air travel.
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. :(
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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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't sell ebooks anymore?
Not individual ebooks directly from O'Reilly. I used to do that. But they've pushed the Safari initiative, and gone wholly on the subscription route.