Ask HN: Conference recommendations for a CS first year undergrad?
What conferences should a first year CS student attend that would be:
-- Relevant to CS
-- Not too overwhelming
-- Not too expensive / possible student discounts
-- Relevant to CS
-- Not too overwhelming
-- Not too expensive / possible student discounts
Conferences are generally really expensive for an individual, even with discounts. Most conferences price attendance with the expectation that a company is going to foot the bill. There are other, more effective, and cheaper ways to both learn new things and meet new people assuming one or both of those are your goals. For example, if it's just about learning many conferences post talks online after the fact for free. Vercel has a Next.js conference if you are interested in web work. AWS re:Invent has some great talks around backend architecture.
The conferences I've gone to have been corporate events (Microsoft, Oracle, GitHub) and I will say the one unique thing about them was direct, easy access to their employees to ask questions and get help with specific issues.
If you post some more specific goals and areas of interest, I or others might be able to point you in a few directions to explore (including some conferences). Also, feel free to ignore! You know yourself best, and it's your journey.