Learnings From Attending My First Big Tech Conference
It must have been around four years ago when I ran out of Futurama episodes to watch while munching food in front of the computer screen. It was a disastrous event. And sad as that was, I somehow picked up the habit of watching tech conference talks instead. I got hooked fast… And somehow all this time, I never got to attend one of these massive tech conferences in person.
That was until recently. I lucked out when Sclable offered to sponsor me and my work-buddy Christoph to attend the Vue.js Amsterdam 2020 conference. I got to sit in an amphitheater with another 1200 professional programmers, listen to experts speak for two days on an enormous stage and be one of those people in the audience I would traditionally see on my laptop’s screen.
Naturally, that experience brought me back home with a slew of thoughts, ideas and observations. I thought it would be worth sharing some of them back with the community.
You probably won’t learn much more about the technology itself
If you’ve been closely following the news about that tech, don’t be surprised if by the end of the conference you… didn’t learn much. If you’ve been following release changelogs, official and community blogs, RFCs, recorded talks by the same speakers in recent conferences, then you already knew most — if not all — upcoming features, timelines, the vision and direction. You may have already played-around with alpha versions or dived deep into experimental source-code trying to make sense of it.
If your profile comes close to this description, you won’t get much out of the conference in that regard. You’ve already walked that path in your own time before reaching the conference venue.
But even if that were the case, there are still many more opportunities left for fun and growth.
You’ll learn many new things about the ecosystem surrounding the tech
Had I to choose the single most valuable takeaway from my trip, that would be the realization I observed sprouting in my head by the end of it:
“Wow, that tech is reaching quite a mature stage. I would have zero doubts committing to it for a new project, no matter the requirements.”
In a competitive domain like the Web front-end, reaching a significant level of confidence for a tech can prove hard, albeit valuable. Yes, it can be beneficial during the experimental, early stages of a new project. But making the right tech stack choice really pays off later on, when things get serious and requirements stretch our tech commitments to their limits.
My confidence wasn’t accrued because I was presented the fancy features of the upcoming major version. They may be impressive, but that wasn’t news to me at the time. What opened my eyes was the breadth and depth of major complementary libraries, satellite projects, and supportive tooling. More importantly learning all about their challenges, progress and roadmaps. Or in some cases just learning that… they exist :). Any core tech may be solid in itself, but unless it comes with an empowered, mature and independent ecosystem, it will always carry more inherent risk.
Established ideas will be reinforced or challenged
Often we make decisions and form ideas within our personal or our team’s echo chamber. We find ourselves before a set of potential approaches, yet we don’t know, or we can’t exactly tell at the time, which is the better one. Sometimes the best path forward is to just “wing it” with what feels best for the team at the time. In the end, done is better than perfect, right? But when you hear experts in the field validating your approach, then that idea in your head will be reinforced into a more permanent and reusable methodology. And that is a valuable transition.
Similarly, you may find yourself revisiting decisions you deemed correct and settled. For example, you may come to see, that what you thought as an elegant way of handling persistent application state, is actually not that great. In fact there has been a simpler, better fitting pattern out there all along. It may even be powered by a well-maintained library which is more robust and leaner than the in-house custom solution your team hand-rolled from scratch.
Not every talk will be fascinating or even sensible
It shouldn’t come as such a surprise, but it’s still a bit striking when you’re sitting in a grand venue and yet some presentation makes you question whether you have walked through the right door.
It may be a long-winded, off-topic introduction, or the remarkably basic subject matter (ill-suited for an expert audience), or even questionable example code on the slides. Either way, it’s safe to expect that the quality of talks can be modeled with a Gaussian distribution. Meaning that outliers are par for the course.
Talks not directly on-subject may be just as fascinating, if not more
Every conference revolves around a specific topic. And in the calendar of many you’ll find sprinkled a couple of talks not necessarily on topic, but perhaps related to the general theme of it.
In my case, while the topic of the conference was Vue.js, I found the lateral talk “Team First” by Tim Benniks deeply interesting. In it, he touches on common cultural and communication challenges many teams eventually face and actionable advice on how to tackle them. On topic? Barely. One of my favorite talks of that day, nonetheless.
There will be little time for sight-seeing or leisure
It is a common misconception that conference travel is leisure time or “vacation-lite”. And while it could be so, much like with business travel, that would defeat its purpose (yes, even if the venue is in Amsterdam).
Expect your stay to be short — no more than a couple of days — and usually overlapping the weekend. During your stay, you’ll find yourself early in the morning already at the venue until late-ish in the evening. It’s a good idea to get there earlier than the start to grab a coffee, mingle and chat, perhaps even rock out a bit on Guitar Hero. 🤘
Following the official conference talks are usually end-of-day events which are wise to attend as it’s usually fun and of course another chance to meet people. A beer is well deserved at this point. All the breaks are on-site and while the food is (hopefully) free, at the end of an intensive schedule, your brain is fully drained along with your body. The best thing you can do at this point is rest to make it through the next conference day or go catch your flight back if it’s over.
Are conferences worth it? Absolutely! Trust me, though, when you’re on your way back, you’ll be glad it’s over.
You get to geek out with your work buddies
Not to be understated is how conferences provide an opportunity to get to know under a different light the people you spend daily so much time with, strictly in a work setting. Sure, after-work beers can go a long way, but the conference/travel experience takes that same effect even further.
You get to hang out with your work buddies for a few days in ways you could not normally do. Be that having breakfast together, getting lost and discovering a city, missing a bus, taking the wrong bus, walking along the red-light district, and of course geeking out on the conference itself, will all be novel memorable experiences you’ll get to form together and keep.
And although I do believe we should treat situations and even relationships differently in work and non-work settings (we’re professionals after all), shared experiences like these can be foundational in both occasions.
You ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ can meet a lot of people
Meeting folks in person may well have been for me the most powerful experience of the whole conference. Granted I’m quite sensitive on the human essence permeating product development in the industry. Understanding the individuals behind the keyboard, their thought patterns and feelings is a key prerequisite for outstanding results, after all.
That’s why I found speaking with colleagues around the world refreshing and heavily inspirational. Colleagues exposed to different environments and ways of doing daily tasks similar to ours. Not unexpected since knowledge-share among colleagues is a surefire way to spark lateral thinking.
Of course, your mileage may vary. You have to actively strike a conversation with people and mingle in groups during breaks. That’s not always easy and is definitely not for everyone. I found it a healthy challenge to chat with a new person on every break. And it turns out that many speakers hang out among the crowd during breaks too and are actually glad to be approached.
The super-stars are just humans
Just the creator of Vue.js rapping Eminem songs on stage, no biggie..
There’s something really freeing and fuzzy about casually chatting with a github/codepen star-coder you’ve been idolizing for years. Even more so when the subject of discussion reaches beyond the “mundane” tech realm. You get to feel how they are just people like “the rest of us”. They can be grumpy and foolish and shy and land awkward dad jokes like us “mere mortals”.
You get to feel how the aspiration gap between the “you” and a potential “you among them” is filled with grounded passion, hard work and dedication, instead of an otherworldly set of gifts and super-intelligence. And yeah, we all sort-of already had that in our rational mind, but it’s something different re-humanizing a glossy internet avatar right in front of you. It’s different when you realize right then and there how the distance between you and them is not that impossible.
10/10 would conference again!1
Educating, fun, fruitful, exhausting; the experience I got from attending my first big tech conference was perhaps overdue and definitely memorable. Most of the reasons why you should do it for yourself or provide it for your employees were purposefully skipped, since that’s been already covered plenty around the interwebs. Regardless, my hope is that through sharing my own experience, your interest got piqued but also your expectations properly set.
Until then, (and until IRL conferences are a thing again, thanks Corona…) why not binge on the Vue.js conf talks? ;)
Thank you for your attention.
--maninak
This article was written for Sclable’s blog on Medium.
If you liked it, give it a clap and share if you ❤️
