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

This sort of thing is true for scientific conferences as well -- that half the point isn't the talks, but connecting with potential collaborators between (or instead of) talks. With numerous conferences this year that haven't been cancelled outright shifting to online, we'll have to see if any of this networking aspect can be captured.

Same with some standard development orgs as well like the IETF. The real value is in the "hallway" meetings or pop up meetings organized over a particular topic. Especially the IETF where they even admit the email list is where official work is done and not really in-person meetings.

The use of collaboration tools like github/lab, wikis and mailing lists help a bit. Maybe we need to give Second Life a second look...

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 spending the last day doing a seminar on some product to a bunch of tired defense contractors who flew across the country to read stuff on their laptops -- if you get in free as a speaker it is probably worth the airfare to commiserate about it with the head of marketing for the sponsor afterwards in the hotel bar.

A nearby city has been thinking about building a conference center, consultants are telling them that most conference centers don't make a profit. Many cities subsidize them because they hope that it will bring in more traffic to other businesses in the area.

However, with conferences being as expensive as they are, I wonder how it is they don't make a profit? Who does?

When I worked on the Mosaic project, I went into my boss's office one day and his shelves had sprouted about 6 shelf-feet of O'Reilly books.

Somehow Terry convinced some O'Reilly rep that since we were helping them sell so many books that maybe they should give us some free books. Turns out that the entire catalog was 6 feet at that particular moment. So he had every. single. O'Reilly book in print. I was not entirely gracious in my jealousy.

A couple times a year I am reminded of the comedians and speakers I heard as a child talking about old things ending all the time, and it's been happening more and more to me. The worst is still the "Guess who died game", but that's so far about losing people I grew up with. As you can tell by the above, I kind of grew up with O'Reilly, and I hope this isn't the end of an era.