Getting the Most out of a Conference

As someone that has now organized my fair share of conferences and other software events, I’ve learned a lot about the people that attend. I’ve learned about about their motivations, fears, and habits.

The list of motivations varies person to person. Some are looking the sharpen their skills. New skills to perform better at work. New skills to get a new position. New skills to avoid atrophy. New skills because it’s enriching. Some are looking to meet people like them. People they can learn from. People they can call on for help. People they can find a new job with. People they can enjoy a conversation with. Some just like free t-shirts. T-shirts. T-shirts. T-shirts. T-shirts.

For the attendees from 15 countries, Abstractions is a very serious commitment. We really appreciate that it is an investment for these people. It’s an investment everyone that chooses to attend (even the t-shirt collector). It’s my job as an organizer is to make sure you receive a good return on that investment.

“And Oh my god! It was Jim Weirich playing guitar with me”

The first conference that I organized, Steel City Ruby 2012, was also the first that I had ever attended. Luckily, surrounded by a team of people that had experience getting the most out of a conference, we were able to create an event that focused on the important things.

We started our event with a talk by coreyhaines (whose Medium avatar is still a drawing of him by drawn Jim Weirich from SCRC 2012). That talk was on getting the most out of a conference. It was meant to be a catalyst for our audience to be social and friendly and make new people feel welcome. All values that we hoped to put forward as a conference.

I still remember advice from this talk, like having a list of questions and finding the person in the room that looks like they’re also looking for a friend.

In fact, when one of our Abstractions attendees tweeted about their nerves attending a conference for the first time, I responded with advice that I remembered from Corey. If you’re standing in a group, leave an area open for new people to join.

In fact, lots of our attendees responded with advice.

The tips varied from the practical to emotional and came from all corners of the world. Tweets of help came from all kinds of attendees. Even the co-founder and COO of npm, Laurie Voss chimed in with help. Laurie has somewhat “celebrity status” in the code community and was one of our invited speakers. It’s important to remember that, even for the people running the coolest tools in the business, we’re all at these conferences for the same reasons: we love the topics and want to be better people.

I hope that the great response from our community helped this particular attendee more comfortable and even excited to attend Abstractions in August. In addition to answering our friend’s response, the set of tweets also inspired us to start a #buddy-system room in our conference Slack. In that chat room, we hope we can pre-pair some people to attend sessions together and get to know each other. It’s sometimes easier to approach new people as a group.

I hope that this post has provided you some confidence meeting new people or given you some basic tactics to making the most out of a conference.

Below you will find some more tweets responding to the original call for advice.

Hopefully I got them all or at least enough to help YOU right now.

Tickets are still available for Abstractions and I encourage you to register today.