PyCon US 2016: Why go to a conference if you can view the talks online?
Author: Michiel Holtkamp
After coming back from PyCon US 2016, I got asked how it was (awesome!) and some people joke why go to a conference if you can view the videos of the talk online? Even though it’s a joke, I think there is a small amount of seriousness in that question. I thought it would be nice to explore that a little bit, so I decided to write a small blog post focusing on that.
Time
There are some downsides to going to a conference. The most obvious one for the conference attender (me in this case) is that it takes time. PyCon US 2016 consisted of two tutorial days, three days main conference and finally four sprint days. Most people (including me) only attend the main conference, so that’s three days. Then you have to travel there so that’s more time. If you travel over many time zones, you also need some time to adjust. All of this time is also something your employer or client misses, since you are not available for regular work.
Luckily there are also upsides. Because it takes time, you can take a step back from your daily work and refresh your mind and can get new insights which can be applied in your work. And since you’re already going to the conference, you can add some holiday too :) Taking a step back by itself can be an advantage to your employer and to clients (and that holiday, you were going to take anyway somewhere this year).
Perspective
You probably have heard or seen the phrase “Are you too busy to improve?”. There are many versions of it (some funny ones can be found by a quick google image search). Being away from the daily workplace can put things in perspective. That one tedious process, is that really the only way to do things? Sometimes even taking a short break will give you that ‘aha’ moment because your mind is released from being too immersed, suffering from tunnel vision. Focus is good, but too much focus… well anything too much is too much isn’t it?
It can be inspiring to take a longer step back and immerse yourself in a totally different environment where people want to share about their insights, innovations and even failures (and what they learned from that). Of course you can get the contents of the talk from a video as well, but it’s different to be actually there. If I watch a video at home, I get easily distracted unless the talk is really, really good. If you are at a conference, it’s easier to focus because you don’t have many distractions around you and let’s face it, you have to stay until the end of the talk anyway because it’s a bit embarrassing to get up during a talk and walk away ;)
Smart people
If you’re attending a conference, you’ll notice that there will be many smart people. You are probably also a smart person. You have something that you’re very good at and people come to you to ask your opinion on a subject. For other subjects, you’ll go talk to other people to get their opinion. At a conference, these other smart people might have something to say; this might be during a talk, random encounters during lunch or at a booth.
Some have something to say and decide to give a lightning talk (short 5-minute-ish talks), which are very diverse. For example “Star Destroyer” is a lightning talk about destroying all ‘import *’ statements, while “I’m a doctor” from the former president of the Django Software Foundation Russell Keith-Magee is about depression in our profession (video).
At PyCon I enjoyed talks about technology: HTTP/2 and Asynchronous APIs (video), Finding closure with closures (video), Remote Calls != Local Calls: Graceful Degradation when Services Fail (video) and my favourite technological talk (mainly because of the excellent delivery): Playing with Python Bytecode (video).
Also there were talks about non-technology related subjects: a talk about Geniuses (video), a talk about Genders (I haven’t seen this myself), a talk about a developer that became a manager (video) and my favourite non-technical (even though it featured some mathematics and motorcycles) talk: the closing keynote by K Lars Lohn (video).
One other outstanding talk was a mixture of technology, learning how to program and social interaction: “Small Batch Artisanal Bots: Let’s Make Friends“. The talk was really funny and inspirational, but sadly the video is cut short and skips to Q&A so I guess that’s another reason to go to a conference!
You can find these video’s and others from PyCon 2016 US in their YouTube channel.
See also my coworker Mattias’ PyCon US 2016 report.
Originally published at www.elements.nl on June 22, 2016.
