You are not wrong in your reason for why a certain type of person attends a conference: to satisfy ego or some other vanity, you are wrong in assuming all (or e

You are not wrong in your reason for why a certain type of person attends a conference: to satisfy ego or some other vanity, you are wrong in assuming all (or even a majority of) people attend conferences for this reason. Conferences in my view exist for a variety of reasons outside of their most commonly associated purpose of existing to provide educational material that others have noted can be easily found other places online for most, but not all. There certainly exist conferences that are more social and some that are more informational where the information being presented is truly groundbreaking and the first time being conveyed to a wide audience is the conference video and transcription. Conferences also allow you to engage and connect with your associated programming community in ways you can not have possibly fathomed outside of the conference. Having lunch with the language creators of Go, as an example, at Gophercon. Sitting through a community design discussion for the future of Rails at a Rails Conf with framework developers and language maintainers like Aaron Patterson. Why the online programming community always seems to downplay the real human element of conferences is beyond me. We aren’t robots. Being around other people with the same interests of you acts in of itself as inspiring. I certainly get pumped for my given interests after I leave a conference for that interest, as most people do.