3 ms·

I've never even HEARD of a 10-day conference before. Most conferences I've seen are two-days with an optional third, broken up as: 1. Optional "workshop" add-

I've never even HEARD of a 10-day conference before. Most conferences I've seen are two-days with an optional third, broken up as: 1. Optional "workshop" add-on day, preceding the main conference. Basically a guided tour through writing a Hello World app in Spring Boot, or React, or whatever framework is hot that year. 2. The main conference. Two days of hour-long sessions, with speakers consisting of: (a) consultants trying to promote their firms, (b) "evangelists" trying to promote their company's products, or (c) local devs who don't require travel expenses, and are just presenting a topic to pad their resumes. Around 90% of the value I've received from technical conferences came from group 2(c), and I'm not sure that was enough to justify the whole. What the author describes sounds more like "a training class", which is a different animal. Even then, I've never seen a training course longer than 5 days.

zerkten 8y ago
I didn't read "I was there for 10 days" to mean a "10-day" conference. CppCon has multi-days classes or workshops that extend the conference. Maybe his employer was good enough to pad the time to cover jetlag. This is something I've seen EU companies do that US companies would never do. PyCon is the longest conference event that I've encountered, but that involves pre-conference workshops and sprints after the conference. It is great to be able to immerse yourself in the community, but it can be tiring by the end.
dahart 8y ago
Author said he was in Seattle for 10 days, not that the conference was that long. The next sentence (“pre-conference course”) even implies the conference was shorter than that. The conference I’ve attended most is Siggraph which is one of the larger conferences the ACM has, and it lasts 5 days. There are several well known co-located “pre-conferences”, both of the educational/training variety as well as pure academic. I get a lot of value out of Siggraph’s content, and almost none from local devs. So, I guess my experience is much more like the article author’s and not much like yours. Cppcon isn’t really a training class per-se, though, maybe you skimmed and accidentally mixed together what the author said about the conference and the pre-conference class? They’re two different things, FWIW.

zerkten 8y ago

I didn't read "I was there for 10 days" to mean a "10-day" conference. CppCon has multi-days classes or workshops that extend the conference. Maybe his employer was good enough to pad the time to cover jetlag. This is something I've seen EU companies do that US companies would never do. PyCon is the longest conference event that I've encountered, but that involves pre-conference workshops and sprints after the conference. It is great to be able to immerse yourself in the community, but it can be tiring by the end.

dahart 8y ago

Author said he was in Seattle for 10 days, not that the conference was that long. The next sentence (“pre-conference course”) even implies the conference was shorter than that. The conference I’ve attended most is Siggraph which is one of the larger conferences the ACM has, and it lasts 5 days. There are several well known co-located “pre-conferences”, both of the educational/training variety as well as pure academic. I get a lot of value out of Siggraph’s content, and almost none from local devs. So, I guess my experience is much more like the article author’s and not much like yours. Cppcon isn’t really a training class per-se, though, maybe you skimmed and accidentally mixed together what the author said about the conference and the pre-conference class? They’re two different things, FWIW.