Talks at conferences tend to be as much about entertainment as education. Let's be honest, there's only so far you can go with a subject within the confines of a one hour speech. So if you're looking to "soak up as much CS knowledge/experience" as you can, try reading some of the classics of CS literature.
That's a good point, but as I was looking over some of the chapters of the highest-rated books, they seemed to be teaching mostly high-level, abstract concepts and ideas without discussing specific technologies or tools. I don't want to come off as naive for dismissing books like these, but a significant part of my CS education in college has used some of these textbooks and I wanted to learn more about specific technologies and services.
I feel most inadequate reading about how start-ups are using actual new technologies like AWS or Couchbase. It seems as if tech talks often provide a good overview of the applications and constraints of new technologies. So given the fact that I do not really have any idea what specific projects I will be working on in the future, I feel that having at least a general overview of what tools are available will prove to be useful.
This is one of the biggest challenges with teaching programming, everything changes incredibly quickly. If you want to write a book that people will recommend for decades, or even for years, you need to gloss over any specific technology and only talk about the concepts that will not change for quite a while.
With that said, InfoQ.com has a lot of videos that sound like what you're looking for.
Jeff Atwood's list of recommended reading is a good place to start: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2004/02/recommended-reading...
This discussion on Stack Overflow also has some good entries in it: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1711/what-is-the-single-m...