Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

morningmindmeld.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 69 posts

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

#31

Post by ghaff »

zerkten wrote: post #25
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?

If your employer is paying, how much more runway do you have to make a decision? Given the current situation, I'd expect many companies to start cutting expenses and making excuses. 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 som…

That's good advice. The general hope is that things start to ramp back up for fall conference season though I'm not placing any big bets on that. A few conferences are still holding to summer plans but IMO that's very iffy especially if they're not at the very tail end.

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

#32

Post by bsder »

hinkley wrote: post #11
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.

This is one of the issues I have with conferences--I have to sit through hours of stuff I don't care about to find the nuggets that are useful.

This is NOT confined to software conferences. I have been to semiconductor conferences and injection molding conferences and the phenomenon is the same.

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

#33

Post by ryansmccoy »

ansible wrote: post #18

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 discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

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

#34

Post by michaelbuckbee »

bsder wrote: post #32
hinkley wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is one of the issues I have with conferences--I have to sit through hours of stuff I don't care about to find the nuggets that are useful. This is NOT confined to software conferences. I have been to semiconductor conferences and injection molding conferences and the phenomenon is the same.

A presentation delivered live doesn't convey information faster than a YouTube video - that's just inherent in the message.

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

#35

Post by ghaff »

alaxsxaq wrote: post #26

I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming disinterested in this event or there was a…

While the trigger was obvious, the way this came down makes one suspect that the in-person events were, if not on the chopping block, at least somewhat precarious. Remember also that it's not just OSCON; O'Reilly had a big slate of events.

(That a lot of people mostly equate OSCON with the O'Reilly events business is likely a symptom of the overall problem. This isn't a commentary on the quality of their events generally--which I've found to be pretty solid--but it does say something about the mindshare they have beyond OSCON.)

And, if I'm being honest, OSCON has gone from being almost a must go if you were in certain open source circles to something still mostly worth going to if you could find the time and budget. OSCON out-survived a lot of shows that were about open source overall but it's frankly a bit hard to be an event about open source in a general way when open source touches almost everything.

In any case, in spite of the special place a lot of people have for OSCON, it probably wasn't sustainable as a standalone event without the rest of the event slate.

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

#36

Post by ansible »

ryansmccoy wrote: post #33
ansible wrote: post #18

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 discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

> They discount the subscription 50% on black friday.

And if I read a dozen node.js books a year, that would be fine. But if I just want to read the one or two Rust books coming out per year... it is not such a good value.

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

#37

Post by kod »

ansible wrote: post #18

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…

Get an ACM membership. It includes full access to oreilly books.

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

#38

Post by sciurus »

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?

LISA.

https://www.usenix.org/conferences/byname/5

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

#39

Post by frandroid »

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.

Local events won't pull in luminaries from around the continent/world spending serious time preparing their presentation, though...

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

#40

Post by akozak »

frandroid wrote: post #39
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.

Local events won't pull in luminaries from around the continent/world spending serious time preparing their presentation, though...

Is that really worth an in-person ticket and hassle? It's not like they mingle anyway.
Post reply on HN