5 observations by a first time tech conference attendee

David Daudelin
Jul 10, 2017 · 2 min read

Most advice is better taken from someone with plenty of experience. But sometimes, a fresh pair of eyes can give suggestions worth considering.

My baby daughter making her first flight to my first tech conference

In the spirit of this, here are five observations from someone who has been to a few non-tech conferences, worked for 10 years in software engineering, but just attended his first tech conference (2017 Chain React):

1. Keep it to one high quality track

More choices means more opportunity cost to attend a talk. Both I and the coworker I talked to were relieved to find there was only one track in the conference. The energy of all the other attendees being in each session also helped make the whole experience more enjoyable.

2. Include relevant vendors with great swag

The highlight networking event of my attendance was to come across the creators of a UI Library I’d just used for a project. Having attended other conferences, I was blown away by the quality of the giveaways which led me to talk to companies I never would have and even write this blog after talking to The Jump team.

3. Make your event app simple and relevant

99% of what I want from an event app is the schedule of events, with the speakers, and the topic of the talks. The fact this event’s app was built with the React Native technology the conference was about made it that much more interesting (especially since a couple of the talks referenced it and dug into the code for it).

4. Keep talks as directly relevant to the conference topic as possible

This may sound obvious but sadly it didn’t seem to be followed a lot of times in this conference and was the number one complaint I heard from my co-workers. Trust that the reason people are coming is because they want to hear from experts in that specific area about either:

a) An advanced topic

or

b) A clear explanation of the basics

5. Choose a great (but not too expensive) destination

My wife and baby daughter with me at the “End of the Oregon Trail”

One of the biggest draws to attending the conference was that it was in a new and appealing state (which also happened to be where my wife’s brother lived so it turned into a family vacation as well) — this was only possible because it was cheap enough for my company to pay for me and for me to pay for my family.

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