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Comment by pavlov | Hacker News Reader

The author mentions a 10-day C++ conference as a turning point for his career. I kind of wish I had that experience because personally I don't seem to get anything out of conferences. I can't think of a single one I would have enjoyed.

Regardless of conference topic, this is how it usually goes: the first talk in the morning is fine, the second one is a mindnumbing one-hour walkthrough of a really complicated way to do something obvious, and by lunchtime I'll rather escape for good than eat lukewarm sandwiches while listening to small talk of how someone's [IoT blockchain startup / enterprise logistics dev team / college course] is amazing because of [conference topic].

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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

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.

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.

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.

I read somewhere (at least 20 years ago) that the best salesmen in the world are constantly going to "how to be a better salesperson" conferences, paying for the thousand dollar fee out of their own pocket. When asked they all said "if I get just one thing that makes me better it will be worth the entire price".

When going to a conference you should be thinking "what is that one thing". There are many different ways to get it: then keynote, the talks, hallway conversations, the vender exhibits, the dinner conversations with strangers. You never know what it will be in advance.

It really depends on the conference.

Ones like Strangeloop out in St. Louis offer an incredible diversity of talks, topics, and forums offered: from language deep dives and workshops to architecture talks to rather arcane talks about modifying an automatic sewing machine to print jpegs onto sweaters and more casual forums on topics like validating resilience and durability guarantees of different datastores.

Ones like Google's series on GCP are exactly as you described though.

Attend CppCon once and it totally changes your mind. Mind blowing number of pure educational talks. There is literally no other conference comparable in terms of technical talks. The rest should be renamed to AdCon.

CppCon, BoostCon, MeetingCpp and others all archive their material on YouTube. I’ve spent countless nights falling asleep on the couch listening to fascinating C++ talks :)

same actually, i always tend to listen to them late at night.

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