51–60 of 69 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They also forced some publishers off the platform, even if they participated in Safari.
I was given a pass to Microsoft Build one year because we were looking to build stuff on Azure but weren't sure which services were mature and which were not. I talked to almost every single PM who had a booth there (and at MS, PMs are also developers). I learned that if you push MS PMs hard enough and ask the right questions, most will drop the marketing facade and give you the insider's view. (after all, developers -- by personality trait -- generally hate two-faced marketing talk and would genuinely rather talk about the tech)
This unfiltered insider's view is decidedly quite different from Microsoft's enterprise marketing's messaging. Attending Microsoft Build and talking to PMs helped us avoid investing our efforts in Azure services that turned out to be dead-ends. (many of Azure's GA stuff are feature complete but not truly production-ready) Short of running POCs, there exist few other low-effort means of procuring this intelligence other than by talking to (honest) Azure consultants at Meetups who have to deal with this stuff in daily production.
My conclusion from the conference (corroborated with my own dev experience) was that the parts of Azure that were built on pre-existing Microsoft technology (like VMs and SQL Servers) were generally solid and could be relied upon.
Whereas many new-fangled PaaS/SaaS cloud-only offerings tend not to be as battle-tested and would often fail on corner cases, so one would be prudent to think twice about putting mission-critical workloads on them. Also, one learns that despite the glossy marketing material, some Azure offerings turned to not have had any dev activity on them due to low uptake. There are still maturity issues in Azure today, and my gut feel is that most enterprises that do run on Azure mostly use their IaaS (VMs, SQL) offerings -- these are the most mature -- rather than their PaaS and SaaS offerings.
The common refrain from marketing folks is that cloud development is a moving target, and what was true a week ago might not be true now (a trivially true statement but of no practical use).
Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.
I had some of the best most awesome conversations during the coffee and lunch breaks. I can only hope that I gave a fraction of insight during my keynote that I received during the hallway talks.
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…
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…
In ye olden days they were a relatively reliable publisher. Now I won't even consider touching them unless I can find many reviews vouching for a book.
Good riddance. They would purchase great conferences, like Hadoop World which costed only $200 to attend, and turn them into $1500 affairs. Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.
The thing is that cheap conferences depend on either a company running it for sales purposes (and mostly not then for big events) or volunteers providing cheap labor--both of which limit the options. Volunteers mostly get tired of running conferences when there are large commercial interests involved--as happened with Hadoop.
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…
Remember that there are only so many businesses (including non-profits) in town that want to rent the place. When people are coming from out of town what difference does the town make? Thus it is hard to fill your conference center.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you’re only there to watch and listen you’re doing it wrong. It’ll be faster, cheaper, and more effective watching videos offline. Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people. It’s for asking questions that are not part of the presentation, learning about something interesting someone is doing that’s not in some slides, or just bouncing off your own crazy ideas on a new audience.
IF they are videoed for offline. Not all conferences are high tech conferences.
> Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people.
Sure, but the injection molding conference I went to was a good example of "It really is about the speakers".
One of the speakers was the first one in North America to get one of the new Japanese 3-D metal printers which include a precision 3-D milling head in the envelope so that they can 3-D print injection molds with conformal cooling for prototype runs. So far, so normal--and not terribly useful to an electrical engineer.
However, he had a throwaway line that their previous solution was to use a Form 2, 3-D print an injection mold in the high-temp plastic, put that mold in an aluminum carrier, and inject 25-50 units before the plastic mold breaks down.
THAT got my attention on a LOT of different dimensions:
1) SLA was good enough for real work with a company doing injection molding whose time is money
2) SLA had good enough surface finish to do injection molding.
3) The high-temp resin was robust enough to hold up to a real injection molding machine
That simple throwaway line was THE nugget of the conference. We bought an SLA printer the next week and the thing hasn't been idle since.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
If you’re only there to watch and listen you’re doing it wrong. It’ll be faster, cheaper, and more effective watching videos offline. Conferences are for networking and interacting with like minded people. It’s for asking questions that are not part of the presentation, learning about something interesting someone is doing that’s not in some slides, or just bouncing off your own crazy ideas on a new audience.
Granted.
But my ability to effectively network is severely ablated when I've been de-energised by being bored out of my skull by crappy content.
Great content energises and sparks conversation. Bad content does the absolute opposite: it's exhausting and mindnumbing. It puts me in a mindset where what I want to do is not talk to people, but get away and get some fresh air.