On: What’s the point of tech conferences?

[pmontra]

As a freelancer you go to a conference to meet customers and colleagues and remember them that you're still alive :-) and still working on the technologies the conference is about. The best way to signal that is to give speech.

As an employee:

If you are in the position to spend money, hire people, buy services, you also meet people you work with and it helps.

If you're junior in general or in some technology, it can be a way to be exposed to it and learn some unknown unknown.

Anything in between, maybe it's just a nice day off, paid by the company.

[bryant → pmontra]

Building on this: it's also a great way for everyone more broadly to see what direction the industry is taking.

Every conference this year will probably be touched by talks talking about AI. If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.

[ihatepython → bryant]

> If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.

Why? My intuition is telling me that this is a 'buy the rumor, sell the news' situation (with this being the 'sell' part)

It would be like buying bitcoin for the first time at $60k.

[bryant → ihatepython]

This would be true if there wasn't a killer app.

But there are more killer apps per industry than there are fingers to count with, with more relevant use cases being discovered practically daily. Yesterday was better, but now is when you make every effort to figure out what you're doing to stay relevant before someone else can tell you that you're not.

[flybrand → pmontra]

For the sales team it’s an easy way to see multiple buyers at once, much easier to see them if they’re spread across a wide area.