In my 10+ year career I've been to exactly one conference: JavaOne in 2016. That's one of the biggest tech conferences (put on by Oracle) I'm aware of and it c

In my 10+ year career I've been to exactly one conference: JavaOne in 2016. That's one of the biggest tech conferences (put on by Oracle) I'm aware of and it covered such a broad array of topics at only a surface level that I really didn't get much out of the lectures (my favorite sessions were the small-group lectures on niche topics (alternative JVM languages, etc.) - Java in general is extremely uninteresting to me). Now, it was the one time I've actually been to San Francisco, so I was able to do some sight-seeing, and the concert Oracle put on was nice - only time I've seen Sting live. Personally, I think I'd much prefer smaller, more focused conferences. Problem is, employers in my industry (Defense) almost never send employees to conferences (I once asked an employer if I could attend a small local conference on a topic directly relevant to the project we were working on - it would have been something like $150 plus two days of overhead for my time. Nope). The only reason I went to JavaOne is someone managed to sneak a 'conference budget' into a contract, so the customer paid for it (Weird things happen when you actually involve engineers in the contracting process).