What are everyone's favorite conferences to attend?<p>I had a blast at WWDC15, although its the first conference I've been to so I don't have much to compare to. The talks were very informative and I'm an iOS nerd so I was in heaven :)<p>How is F8? Google I/O? Any other lesser known ones?
I try to find people whose talks I enjoyed in the past and check their speaking schedule on lanyrd. I then cross reference that with cities I'd like to visit, topics that will get me passionate, and other good quality speakers. I find since I've been doing this, my joy vs exhaustion ratio of conferencegoing has risen dramaticaly
Here's a gathering that nobody has mentioned: Porcupine Festival in New Hampshire. It's not a "developer conference" per se, but there are very solid tech talks there. It probably has a more dense schedule of events than a typical tech conference, but it has a lot of material that might be considered "off topic" at a tech conference, such as political theory, practical tips for living freely (gardening, handing police encounters, etc), and, of course, a giant bonfire.<p>There <i>are</i> also really wonderful tech talks, and this has pretty much become the focus of the event. In addition to dev talks - which range in topic from crypto to mesh networking to solar power monitoring - there's also material on 3D printing, drones, beer brewing automation, high-tech gunsmithing, and radio communication.<p>There's also a beer exchange cum key-signing party which has become a hillariously awesome tradition.<p>It's great fun and a great place to learn things you didn't know you wanted to learn.<p>Other than Porcupine Festival, I'll also echo other people's suggestion to attend PyCon. It's more of a cultural event than a dev conference per se, but it's a really great gathering. And being in Portland, it's surely going to be quite a party.
Sry about hijacking the thread, but tbh, I don't have fun in any niche-tech stack conference (e.g., Scala conference, PyCon, generic startup competition hackathon), does anyone have recommendations for the most subversive tech conferences?<p>e.g., DEFCON, Chaos Communication Congress, HOPE or Demoparties from the DemoScene or BioHacking conferences?
LambdaConf in Boulder was fantastic last year. Covers all manner of functional programming topics. 3 days in late May.<p><a href="http://lambdaconf.us/" rel="nofollow">http://lambdaconf.us/</a>
Gratuitous plug, but I've been maintaining a haphazard list of conferences at my Indie Conference [1] site. It focuses on bootstrapped / indie developers & digital nomad types, but there's lots of developer conferences listed there.<p>If you're an iOS nerd, you might like these conferences:<p>Yosemite (March, USA): <a href="http://cocoaconf.com/yosemite/" rel="nofollow">http://cocoaconf.com/yosemite/</a><p>NSNorth (April, Canada): <a href="http://nsnorth.ca" rel="nofollow">http://nsnorth.ca</a><p>UIKonf (May, Germany): <a href="http://www.uikonf.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.uikonf.com</a><p>360iDev (August, USA): <a href="http://360idev.com" rel="nofollow">http://360idev.com</a><p>iOS Dev UK (September, Wales): <a href="http://www.iosdevuk.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.iosdevuk.com</a><p>Release Notes (September, USA): <a href="http://releasenotes.tv/conference/" rel="nofollow">http://releasenotes.tv/conference/</a><p>Cocoa Love (October, USA): <a href="http://cocoalove.org" rel="nofollow">http://cocoalove.org</a><p>[1] <a href="http://www.indieconference.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.indieconference.com/</a>
BSDCan (<a href="http://www.bsdcan.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.bsdcan.org/</a>) is always good, and incredibly cheap compared to most technical conferences.
We run a small-ish (~300 people) un-conference every year in Vancouver, BC that has been going strong for the past 4 years. If you are looking for something a little more spontaneous and less polished where you can really engage with the software community and something that isn't centered around a particular language, framework or company then it is worth a look. Also it is inexpensive, thanks in part to being an un-conference and in larger part to great sponsors.<p><a href="http://www.polyglotconf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.polyglotconf.com/</a><p>The 2016 conference details will be announced shortly in the new year.
Have to give it up for Webstock (<a href="http://www.webstock.org.nz/16/" rel="nofollow">http://www.webstock.org.nz/16/</a>) and Beyond Tellerrand (<a href="http://beyondtellerrand.com" rel="nofollow">http://beyondtellerrand.com</a>), which are more towards the design/culture of tech side but consistently great.
Not as much an actual language/dev conference, but I'm excited to go to Microconf, billed as "The Conference for Self Funded Startups."<p><a href="http://microconf.com" rel="nofollow">http://microconf.com</a>
Last year's React-Europe was one of the better conferences I attended (save for bad climatisation, which I hear is not a problem for this year). It's also fairly small for how interesting it is; highly recommended.<p><a href="https://www.react-europe.org/" rel="nofollow">https://www.react-europe.org/</a>
Strange Loop[0] is the go to multi programming language paradigm in my opinion. It's held in St Louis, Missouri every year and features some of the very best speakers in the domain of programming language design, theory and computer science.<p>0 - <a href="http://www.thestrangeloop.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.thestrangeloop.com/</a>
[DebConf16](<a href="http://debconf16.debconf.org/" rel="nofollow">http://debconf16.debconf.org/</a>) but that is for Debian geeks and general FLOSS hackers :)
Academic conferences in a relevant field can be very interesting, and are often much cheaper than industry events. (You'll need to find some practical-enough conferences, and you'll need to somehow pick up the required vocabulary and concepts.)<p>Speaking for my own field, Real-World Cryptography should be mostly understandable (and entertaining) to a programmer and enthousiast cryptographer. (CHES and EUROCRYPT are also very interesting, but require a lot more background.)<p>(Also consider e.g. ACM, Usenix, and any local interest/user groups.)
Celebrate the /joy/ of coding June 17th in Rotterdam, the Netherlands at:<p><a href="http://joyofcoding.org" rel="nofollow">http://joyofcoding.org</a><p>If you live near by and want to do deliver a short talk or lead a workshop, have a look at the Call For Sessions.<p>Video from last year: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI2yOM4tODw" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LI2yOM4tODw</a><p>Disclaimer: I'm co-organizing this event.
If you're language agnostic when it comes to programming the "nordic" conferences are pretty damn awesome. Meaning:<p>GOTO conferences (Copenhagen, but also London, Berlin, Chicago and Amsterdam nowadays) - <a href="http://gotocon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gotocon.com/</a>
Recorded talks: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/GotoConferences</a><p>NDC (Originally Oslo, now also in London and "somewhere in Australia") - <a href="http://ndcoslo.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ndcoslo.com/</a>, <a href="http://ndc-london.com/" rel="nofollow">http://ndc-london.com/</a>
Recorded talks: <a href="https://vimeo.com/ndcconferences" rel="nofollow">https://vimeo.com/ndcconferences</a><p>OreDev (Malmo, Sweden) - <a href="http://oredev.org/" rel="nofollow">http://oredev.org/</a>
Also has links to recorded talks
I've been to a few across the US and my favorites so far have both been in Colorado:<p>Develop Denver - <a href="https://developdenver.org/" rel="nofollow">https://developdenver.org/</a><p>Rocky Mountain Ruby - <a href="http://rockymtnruby.com/" rel="nofollow">http://rockymtnruby.com/</a>
AWS re:Invent is rad.<p>The sheer size of vendors and attendees is staggering. They keynotes are polished and generally reveal exciting things. The tech talks are numerous and sorted into 100, 200, 300 and 400 tracks based on how technical they are.<p>If you're building stuff on or for AWS you won't go home without learning something new.
2 UK options –<p>For front-end stuff: <a href="http://2016.render-conf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://2016.render-conf.com/</a><p>For people who lead tech teams: <a href="http://2016.theleaddeveloper.com/" rel="nofollow">http://2016.theleaddeveloper.com/</a><p>Disclosure: I help run them ;)
If you are into subversive, I don't think you'd find anyone who doesn't love Chaos Communication Congress (<a href="https://events.ccc.de" rel="nofollow">https://events.ccc.de</a>).
I'm a regular at Linux.conf.au (Feb, Australia): <a href="http://linux.conf.au/" rel="nofollow">http://linux.conf.au/</a><p>It is mostly Linux but a lot of other related stuff gets in.
It highly depends on what you want. If you want some general high quality overview of what happened over the year, I recommend GOTO or QCon. These are great events.
I'm a big fan of the ACCU conference. It's not too big, but packed with lots of good talks.<p><a href="http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016" rel="nofollow">http://accu.org/index.php/conferences/accu_conference_2016</a>
I like to watch the talks on CPPCon on youtube (never attended it though); seems to be a very interesting conference.<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon/videos" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/user/CppCon/videos</a>
AT&T Developer Summit & Hackathon 2016 is happening right now at Las Vegas, Nevada <a href="https://devsummit.att.com/" rel="nofollow">https://devsummit.att.com/</a>
I haven't been to these, but I've been eyeing up <a href="http://gotocon.com/" rel="nofollow">http://gotocon.com/</a> recently
PolyConf maybe? <a href="http://polyconf.com/" rel="nofollow">http://polyconf.com/</a><p>I've heard very good reviews about previous editions.