I've been a professional C, Perl, PHP and Python developer.
I'm an ex-sysadmin from the late 20th century.
These days I do more Javascript and CSS and whatnot, and promote UX and accessibility.
I went to my first conference this month, and it was great. Partly because it wasn't in my area of expertise, though I had a lot of general, "domainy" knowledge. I'd do it again.
I haven't been before because they're waaaay expensive and I'd need to take time off work. Get work to pay for it, you say? Well companies tend to only pay for me to go to a conference in my area of expertise, and since most of these will consist of people giving entry-level talks or completely off-topic stuff like "how to feel good in your office" I've always seen them as a bit of a waste of everybody's time.
There's no point in going if I'm taking up the space of someone who really wants to be there and might learn something that helps them out in their career.
I also have a deep-seated distaste for "swag" culture. Charging people extra to let them in so you can give them "free" goodies is nonsense.
Socialising with people? Probably not for me.
That sort of thing.
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I went to my first conference this month, and it was great. Partly because it wasn't in my area of expertise, though I had a lot of general, "domainy" knowledge. I'd do it again.
I haven't been before because they're waaaay expensive and I'd need to take time off work. Get work to pay for it, you say? Well companies tend to only pay for me to go to a conference in my area of expertise, and since most of these will consist of people giving entry-level talks or completely off-topic stuff like "how to feel good in your office" I've always seen them as a bit of a waste of everybody's time.
There's no point in going if I'm taking up the space of someone who really wants to be there and might learn something that helps them out in their career.
I also have a deep-seated distaste for "swag" culture. Charging people extra to let them in so you can give them "free" goodies is nonsense.
Socialising with people? Probably not for me.
That sort of thing.