Attending Conferences

How my conferences attendance shifted over the last decade.

There’s a lot to say about tech conferences, shows, and exhibits in any form. I’ve been to a few of them over the last decade, and I probably can't count anymore at this point.

I thought it’d be interesting to write a thing or two about them and how my experience changed from my first participation in a gathering of tech people to the most recent one.

Goals

What especially changed for me over the last 15 years is the expectation of conferences.

I remember that the first conferences I went to appeared especially exciting because of the content. I was utterly interested in hearing about new technologies, discovering new features, and learning new practices. My goal as a young software engineer was to become the best at my craft, so I’d go there and attend as many lectures as I could.

Sometimes, that would be very challenging. Take the FOSDEM, one of the largest open-source conferences in Europe, with thousands of geeks attending. I attended FOSDEM numerous times. The buildings they use to run the conference have been the same all along those years, and are known to be way too small to welcome many people to most conferences. There are fantastic talks done by some of the world's greatest hackers, but there are more people waiting in the hall to access the talk than people in the room listening to it.

Regular FOSDEM attendance

You could think that this would ruin the conference for most people, but I think it does not. It shows the other very important aspect of conferences: social interaction.

I know there are so many stereotypes about tech guys not interacting with each other. The truth is, as human beings, we crave social connections, and events are a great source of those. Attending my first OpenStack Summit in 2013 allowed me to meet people I only chatted with over IRC, and it was a real game changer later on.

As my engineering career grew, there was not much interesting to learn from the talks. Many lectures became boring or déjà-vu.

I quickly switched sides and became the one giving talks and sharing knowledge. This was great. It gave me a great sense of recognition, validation, fear, and adrenaline. It’s a significant boost for anyone’s career. It was a game changer for me.

COVID

When COVID happened, everything changed.

I remember receiving a phone call in early March 2020 from Sylvain Zimmer, organizer of the dotConferences. I was booked to speak at dotPy, and my talk on Python performances and profiling was ready to go in a couple of days. I would be live on stage in a Parisian theater in front of hundreds of people. Sylvain explained that something was happening, that they couldn’t risk having this event run, and that they had to cancel.

For the next months, every event was canceled, and people shifted to online, remote work, etc. — you know it all. This broke local communities and the habit of many people going to conferences.

I think this shows overall as there are fewer people going to events today than there used to be. People got used to accessing content over the Internet, webinars bloomed, and since many conferences published their lectures online, interest in traveling to a conference reduced a lot.

I relaunched the Python Toulouse meetup group 18 months ago. There were more than 800 members on that group when we announced that we were scheduling a new session in October 2022—3 years after the last one.

We got only 5 attendees.

Since then, we have continued pushing the event every couple of months, and the event has grown back to more than 40 attendees (and I have stepped down from the organizers).

I think this shows well how bad the COVID hit conferences and meetups in general.

Attending Conferences

As I started running Mergify a few years ago, my expectations of conferences shifted again. As we are building a developer tool, so the developer is now a persona we want to reach to make us aware of what we’re building.

There are two ways of doing that, and most developer-focused companies do one or both:

• speak at conferences;

• expose at conferences (sponsoring).

I’ll write something about event sponsoring some other time.

Winning a slot to speak at conferences is not easy: it requires expertise (we have) and time and focus (we don’t have much). In my case, we encourage folks at Mergify to respond to calls for papers, teach other developers the problems we solve, or share our experience on various topics. This is not always working; unfortunately, we are not experts at playing the CfP game—another topic I should write about.

First, I noticed that while there are more and more software engineers, many of them don’t care about going to conferences. They know most of the talks are already online or will be. As the CfP game is getting professional, many talks you see at conferences have already been lectured, filmed, and published online. Engineers valuing their time might not go to conferences in the end.

Some conferences are trying to fix that by not publishing their talks online. I think it can be a good strategy in certain cases, but as many conferences invite speakers with talks running for months if not years, it’s likely you can already watch the content online anyway.

Second, many events and conferences still overpromise the number of people actually attending. It’s likely the pre-COVID level is not back everywhere.

Last, the average technical level of expertise of both speakers and attendees fluctuates a lot. However, the more I think about it, the less I see a pattern. Some community-run conferences have great and poor content simultaneously; some professional conferences have attendees with low-skill but great speakers. It’s hard to have a rule, and I think it’s really on a case-by-case basis—and it might be subjective, after all.

Those issues might be anecdotic for most, though they’re not for me as they explain partly why Mergify's sponsoring of events has been mostly a failure over the last year.

But I’ll talk about that later.