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How to Attend a Developer Conference

William Grosso @ May 30, 2008

I recently attended Google IO1. While I was there, I ran into some friends. One of whom asked me:

Hey Bill. You know how to network and attend conferences and stuff. What should I be doing here?

Once I got past the momentary confusion (I’m not particularly good at networking and I’m not sure anyone should be asking me how to network), I refocused the question on “How to maximize your learning at a developer conference” and came up with some simple tips. So, ahem, without any further ado

Thirteen Tips to Help You Learn a Lot at Your Next Developer Conference:

  1. Don’t try to learn too much. Google IO had 6 or 7 tracks (AppEngine, GWT, Mobile, …..). I picked two (GWT and AppEngine) and picked a preferred one (GWT). The net effect is that I have a really good grasp of what’s possible with the two of those, and very little idea what Android is. Which might seem like a bad outcome2 until you compare it to going to a lot of unconnected talks and trying to remember hundreds of unrelated details.
  2. Don’t try to do too much. People frequently fill every slot with a talk, and then also go to birds of a feather sessions in the evening. Pace yourself. The deep truth is that you’re not going to be fresh if you do this, and you’re not going to learn a lot. Focus on 4 talks in a day, and really pay attention to those.
  3. Don’t go to talks you could give. Lots of people do this. You see them patiently sitting through the entire talk, so that they can ask a question at the end (and it’s a question they could have asked via a mailing list). It’s …. counterproductive behavior.
  4. Don’t go to talks you could give next month. Maximizing learning at a conference does not involve mastering the details of a technology. The goal is to learn what’s possible and understand the scope of a technology. If you know enough that the difference between your knowledge and the knowledge required to give the talk is small, you’re not going to learn a lot in the talk.
  5. Only go to advanced talks. The point of going to a conference is not to master the details of a technology. It’s to learn what’s possible and understand the scope of a technology. You know it’s possible to write “Hello World”, and you know there’s a “getting started” tutorial somewhere on the web. What you want to know is what’s hard to do, what’s impossible to do, and what experts in the technology think is impressive. That will help you evaluate whether the technology is useful and/or important. From this perspective, introductory talks are a waste of time3.
  6. Don’t have a short-term agenda. If you’re trying to learn something to use next week, stay home and code. It’s more productive in the short-term.
  7. Don’t have a long-term agenda. Don’t learn things because they’ll be important to you in 3 years, or because maybe someday you’ll need it. By the time you get around to using what you learned at the conference, the technology will have changed completely4.
  8. Always pause after talks and summarize them to yourself. Nothing solidifies your memory of what was just said better than repeating it back in a different form. I spoke to one Google IO attendee who was focused on a different track. “What did you learn this morning?” I asked. “Errr, ummm. You know. That things are, ummm, sort of moving fast….. lots of stuff is possible.”
  9. Don’t read e-mail. I violate this one all the time, but it’s a bad habit. Really be at the conference.
  10. Take notes. Don’t assume you’ll remember everything. And taking notes has an interesting side-effect: the act of writing things down, even if you never read the notes later, helps you remember what you learned.
  11. Make note of interesting sessions you missed and watch the on-line videos later. This only applies to conferences that make online videos available of course. But “going back to the conference” a week later will help you remember what you saw at the conference (and, also, you’ll learn some new things from the videos).
  12. Talk to fellow attendees. Ask them What did you see? or How was that talk? or Did you hear anything really amazing? 9 times out of 10, they’ll be inarticulate and you won’t learn anything. But, 1 in 10 times, you’ll hear something interesting.
  13. Bring business cards. When you talk to people, give them a card. 99 times out of 100, nothing will come of it. But, who knows, maybe something will. And, in any case, it’s a way to solidify a conversation.

Okay, those last two were really networking tips. But the first 11? Purely about the learning.

  1. While I’m not an active developer any more, I like to go to developer conferences. It helps me keep abreast of what’s new and compelling in technology↩
  2. Android is important, after all.↩
  3. Note that if you go to an advanced talk and you aren’t advanced, you shouldn’t ask questions. It’s completely inappropriate to ask beginner or intermediate level questions at an advanced talk.↩
  4. And you probably won’t remember anything anyway.↩

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