111 How Do I Get The Most Out Of A Developer Conference Or Event?

How do I get the most out of the conference I will be attending? Should I even attend developer conferences? Am I going to learn a lot attending a conference? Should I try to convince my boss to send me to a conference? These are the questions we are going to answer in today's episode of Dev Questions.

Website: https://www.DevForge.com/ 
Ask Your Question: https://suggestions.iamtimcorey.com/
Sign Up to Get More Great Developer Content in Your Inbox: https://signup.iamtimcorey.com/

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Dev Questions Podcast with Tim Corey. Join us each episode as we tackle the questions you are asking about a career in software development, understanding the industry, and new technology. If you're just starting out or you want to grow stronger as a developer, this is the place to get your questions answered. Now, here's your host, expert developer and online educator, Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_02 0:25

How do I get the most out of a developer conference or event? Should I even go to a conference? What can I do to get the most value out of a conference if I do go? And should I try to convince my boss to send me to a developer conference? These are the questions we're going to answer on today's episode of DevQuesti. And if you have a question you'd like to get answered, go to suggestions.imtimcorey.com, leave that suggestion there, and hopefully you'll see your question answered on a future episode of DevQuesti. So are developer conferences good and how do you get value out of them? That's we're going to tackle today. And I think that developer conferences are both extremely valuable, but also very misunderstood. So let's talk through how you get the most value of it and what really is the point of a developer conference. I think that's what's really missed in this. And just to preface this, I do speak at quite a few developer conferences every year. And if you're at a conference, it's fine if I'm there. Check me out and definitely say hi if I'm there. But how do you get the most value out of a conference? Because usually, I'm going to say this, I'm I hope that you hear me. Usually people waste their time and money going to conferences. Not because the conference isn't valuable, but because they don't take advantage of the value of the conference. So what is the value of the conference? Number one, you're being exposed to new topics. Okay. So when you go, there's a whole bunch of sessions usually you can go to, and you'll get to see new things, hopefully. Well, if you go to these new topics and you say, oh, that's really great, then you've been exposed to something new that you might be able to take back to your job, to your employer, or to just your development career in general. I remember a talk that Rob Richardson gave, I forget it's a few years ago, where he talked about taking your SQL database back up and putting it into a Docker container. And if you've watched my YouTube channel, you'll know I have a video on how to do that. And that's based upon the thread, the core of what I learned at that Rob Richardson talk. Now, he gave me the idea. He gave me some pointers on how to do it well, and then I went back and practiced it. I learned how to do it, I tweaked it to how I wanted to see it done, and then I implemented it in actually more than one business situation because of the fact it was so valuable. It was something new that I learned that I knew about Docker, I knew about SQL backups, I knew how to script things, but it was really someone saying, Hey, have you thought about putting these things together? It was something new that I'm like, oh, aha, I can do that. And here's the value of it. So I was exposed to something new that allowed me to make some significant benefits in my job and also in helping you in your job, hopefully. And that's the kind of thing that is really valuable about a conference. It's about being exposed to these new topics, being exposed to new ways of doing things, seeing things from a different perspective. And what I clarify here, you don't learn in that session how to do it necessarily. Yes, you may see how to build something. In fact, I think Rob actually built the entire thing in the session. But I wasn't learning all that while he was teaching. It's too much take in, it's it's too much information overload. But instead, what I was doing was I was picking up the highlights of what he was doing and making notes about, hey, I want to learn more about this. And that's really important. Pick up the topics, the ideas, the concepts, and say, hey, I want to learn more about this. Take notes. But don't take notes that are massive and huge and try and follow every step along the way of every bit of code they typed or every bit of uh syntax they wrote in a script. That's not really the value of the conference. You can probably download that source code later. You can ask the presenter for a copy of their slides. That's not the point. The point isn't to take pictures of the slides, the point isn't to try and recopy or redo the source code in the session. The point is to listen to the big ideas and to get a high-level overview of what they're trying to accomplish and how they're accomplishing it. That way you can say, yeah, I think that might be valuable to learn, or I think that might fit in this situation we have at work. The idea is you're capturing big ideas. That's one of the biggest values out of a conference is those big ideas. It's not about the specific implementation details, it's about the big ideas. When I go to a conference, I have notepad on my phone. Now, I usually have an actual written notepad as well, but I take notepad on my phone and I'll just write down the big ideas. Hey, learn about this, learn about that. The last event I went to is a training event where it wasn't a huge training event, it was a smaller training event, but when I was there, I wrote down three different notes and three different things to think through and remember and come back to later to investigate more. So I took those three notes, which were about five words total, I wrote them down. And then later I went back and I had some time at my computer at home, where I said, okay, let's dive deeper into each of these things to see if they're valuable for me. And a couple of them weren't. I looked into them more, I learned more about them, and I figured out, you know what, this probably doesn't fit my situation. But the third one, fit my situation, I think it's getting important, I think I need to learn more about it. And so I started to dive into it. So that's how you get the value out of a conference. It's not about learning every line of code they type or taking a picture of every single screen. That's really a distraction, and it really actually makes your uh value go down for the conference because you're not actually paying attention to the big picture. You're focusing in on the details too much. That's number one. So, number one, you're gonna be exposed to new topics. Number two, is you're gonna start to build relationships. And I know some people don't like this. They want to kind of just live their life in a little bubble where they don't talk to people they don't know. But conferences are a great time to build these relationships. Start to get to know people. And you can do this pretty easily. When you're in a food line, talk to the person next to you. When you're in any kind of line, except maybe the bathroom, but talk to the person next to you. Hey, what's the what's the one thing that you learned so far that you're gonna use? Um, hey, is something new you learned today? Um, what's one thing that you know you think is gonna be important for the future? These kind of questions start to go down the path. Or just, hey, what do you do? What's your job? Hey, can I learn more about that? You know, what what technologies do you work with? And you start to ask these questions to learn more about them. Because these relationships will really start to build and grow over time. When you have lunch, don't sit by yourself. Intentionally pick somebody else to sit next to, just get to know them a little bit. Get to know a situation. You'd be surprised how much you learn, how much you go, oh, I didn't know you could do that. You know, when they when they start to explain their job, you might say, wait, you're doing that? How does that work? And you start to learn more about it. Or maybe you start to build a relationship where you find out they like Marvel too, and you start to talk about Marvel or Star Wars or whatever you want to talk about, and you start to build a real a relationship where maybe you start to have correspondence outside the conference where you start to talk through not just the things you enjoy, but also work too, and start to build those relationships. Relationships are important. The more you can build those, the better off you will be when it comes to changing jobs. If you have a problem with something, if you need to find someone to work with you. Those are the kind of things that are really great for relationships because those relationships you can lean on, you can say, hey, wait, I know a person who does this. So that's the kind of thing that I have been doing at conferences. I try and spend as much time as possible talking to people because doing so will start to kind of grow that network of people that I know. So that when I need help with something, I know who to call rather than just saying, I need help and hoping that somebody can help me. I know who to talk to that I've already kind of learned how they work and learn how you think and say, yeah, I think that person would do a great job at this task. So growing that network of acquaintances, of potentially friends, or at least people that you know can be really important. And the conference is the place to do that. Now, number three, you can get an outside opinion on your work. Sometimes when you're working for an organization, maybe you have one, two, three employees, maybe it's a larger staff, but you're just not sure on something. You know, maybe you're working on a.NET framework project that's pretty large, and you want to move to.NET Core, and you're just not sure, hey, is it the right time to move? How do I break it up? What are the things I need to think through when you start to again talk to people at conferences? You'll be able to find out, hey, hey, I didn't know you moved to.NET Core. Can you tell me about that? What went well? What didn't go well? What are the things I should look out for? Those kind of things will give you an outsider's opinion on what you're doing. It's not just, you know, asking Stack Overflow, may not the best solution for that. But when you talk to a person, you can ask those questions where you can say, hey, you know, what were your thoughts on this? We're looking at, you know, going to uh MySQL from SQL. Is that a good idea? What are your thoughts on that? Have you ever tried that? Um, what do you think the upsides and the downsides are? Um, what are your thoughts on moving to.NET Six directly from.NET Framework? Is that a too big of a jump? Should I, you know, stop in the middle somewhere? These kind of questions you can ask of people who've already done that. So having this outsider's perspective on your job also gives the ability to have a person that takes a step back, looks at your situation from the outside, and says, Do you want to do it that way or do you want to rethink this? It gives us that idea that that bigger picture perspective that maybe sometimes we miss because we're so far buried into the forest. We don't see the forest because we're concentrating on the trees. And so a person can step back and look at the whole picture and go, hey, you know what? You're kind of heading towards a cliff here. Maybe think about that. So that's another thing you can get out of conferences. Mixing with people who do the same thing or similar things to what you're doing can really improve your perspective on how you do things and really help you ask the right questions. Now, number four is you're going to get a chance to dream, not just grind. When you are working for a company, working on a big project or working on a big code base, sometimes it's easy to get so buried in work where you're just focused on the next thing, the next thing, the next thing, and you're just fixing bugs and adding features and tweaking things and going back to the, you know, fixing more bugs and more bugs, and you kind of forget to pick your head up and look at the big picture. Maybe you're just, you know, head down, adding features, adding features, adding features, and fixing bugs, and you're not really thinking about how do we maintain this long term? How do we move forward in the new versions of.NET? How do we, you know, take advantage of the latest things coming out? And so a conference, whether it's a one-day conference or a full-week conference, a conference can take you out of that, where you're not focused on your code. You're not focused on what your next bug fix should be. You're focused in on learning new things and learning how new things work. And all of a sudden, you kind of take a step back and you start to think about the new things rather than just your code. And there's a lot to be said for focusing on your code and a lot to be said for focusing on where you're at, not just always dreaming. But when you're at a conference, you have the ability to kind of rest, take a breath, refocus, think through, hey, you know what? If we did this, it would save us X number of hours per week. Sometimes you'll find that a little bit of time spent not just fixing bugs can make the rest of your bugs less, where you can actually save yourself time over time. So it's good to take a step back and really think through a big picture and start to dream about what's the future hold? Where are we going? What's the end goal? What's the the big milestones, not just the next little step? And a conference is really good at helping you do that. So conferences expose you to new topics, they help you build relationships, they're going to give you an outset opinion of your work, and they're also giving you a chance to dream, not just grind. So those are the things I think are really important about conferences. I really think that they're valuable if you take advantage of them. If you go to a conference just trying to learn everything that a session teaches you, and you just spend that time, well, why couldn't you do that on YouTube? Why do you have to spend thousands of dollars and go away to get what you could have got on YouTube? The value of the conference is more than just the actual thing you learn in the session. It's about a lot more than that. And hopefully that gives you a good idea of how to maximize the investment in a conference. I think that conferences are important. I think they're valuable. I do think it's more important to go to a conference rather than go to an online conference. I think that online conferences lose a lot. Remember, I said expose new topics? Yeah, you can do that on an online conference. Build relationships? Not really. Get an outside perspective, not really. And get a chance to dream, that's hard because usually at a virtual conference, you're at your desk where maybe you're even thinking about your code that's right next to you. It's harder. So really you lose about two and a half to three out of the four benefits of a conference. So that's why I say that going to conferences is so valuable. All right, I hope that answers your question. Thanks for listening. And as always, I am Tim Corey.

SPEAKER_01 16:31

Thank you for joining us for this episode of Def Questions. Tim is committed to making it easier for you to become a developer. If you would like to help make more content like this possible, please like, subscribe, rate, and share Deaf Questions. You can also send your questions to questions at IamTimcorey.com. Until next time, remember, you are too smart and your time too valuable to waste it making all the mistakes Tim did. When you're ready to learn to think and code like a professional developer, head over to imtimcore.com and enroll in a course.