DEV Community

Shayne Boyer
Shayne Boyer

Posted on

What is the best swag you've received at a conference or meetup?

The atypical stuff you usually get when walking into a conference is the t-shirt or screen-printed bag. But what has been that item you took a second and when daaaang, now that's nice! Or thought, that was different?

For me there are two levels.

  1. Speaker gifts
  2. Attendee giveaways

Dockercon Europe 2017 gave out super nice puffy jackets to the speakers that were embroidered with the conference logo.

Shout out to @DockerCon for the awesome speaker gift! It’s quite cozy and packs up tightly. pic.twitter.com/vs4itVlhk3

— ✨ Ashley McNamara ✨ (@ashleymcnamara ) October 17, 2017

As an attendee, I have gotten beach towels, fidget spinners, stickers, every t-shirt you can imagine...

What's been your favorite?

Top comments (7)

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I love this GitHub figurine I got in my speaker swag at CodeLand

Collapse
 
maximrouiller profile image
Maxime Rouiller

Personally, I liked the waterbottles given to us during the Azure Tour.

Unique to each city, actually useful and of quality and the branding is tiny on it so it doesn't look like "Conference swag" but more like "Awesome swag".

Collapse
 
moopet profile image
Ben Sinclair

I've never been to a conference and I've never been to a meetup that had swag.
In general, I find the idea problematic, since these conferences tend to cost a lot to go to, and some of that money has to be going to subsidise these pointless trinkets. I'd prefer to get in for an amount of money I can afford instead.

Collapse
 
ben profile image
Ben Halpern

I too find the trinkets pretty pointless, but I think their presence in our current economy probably goes towards subsidizing the ticket price. The sponsor pays the venue, say, $25 per attendee to give away the swag that costed somebody $2.50, in theory the net benefit is passed off to the attendee in some way if they don't mind being sold to.

In a few cases, like my treasured, octocat figurine I posted in this thread, it seems like a win-win-win where the trinket isn't pointless. But yeah, this kind of appreciated value is usually lost and the whole effort is wasteful capitalism.

Collapse
 
spboyer profile image
Shayne Boyer

There are meetups and user groups at times that are sponsored. Weekend Code Camps too give fun things away, but obviously not why any of us go. Still, cool to be surprised with a neat giveaway even at the free shows.

Collapse
 
efleurine profile image
Emmanuel

I got an Oculus Go, at F8 this year. Not sure if it is a swag but that was cool

Collapse
 
shanker702 profile image
shane

At DevIntersections, I got a powerbank from Microsoft with like 9000mah, pretty sweet. They were just sitting out on the table, kind of wish I went back around a grabbed an extra.