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Ask HN: Have you been to any conferences that changed your life in some way?

6 pointsby caserover 6 years ago
Ask HN: Have you been to any conferences that changed your life in some way? How?

2 comments

SyneRyderover 6 years ago
I went to the first World Domination Summit in 2011, a conference in Portland for readers of the &quot;Art Of Nonconformity&quot; blog. It was popular with one-person businesses, people who created &amp; sold their own products (typically online). Though when I got there, the crowd had lots of life coaches &amp; people starting their first blog.<p>It changed my life in that I got a job out of it - I ended up being hired by someone I met in the hallway between talks. We bonded over how much we <i>weren&#x27;t</i> enjoying the talks, finding them to be more &quot;motivational&quot; than actionable &amp; substantial. (Something about people singing &quot;Kumbaya&quot; a lot.)<p>I&#x27;ve since realized the value in conferences is usually not in the talks themselves, but the people you meet in the &quot;hallway track&quot; or the conference social events like evening drinks, bungee jumping, skydiving, etc. The talks &amp; speakers are there to attract like-minded people and provide a shared topic of conversation. I&#x27;ve always made more business contacts &amp; friends from the skydiving, and learned much more from the private conversations over drinks at the bar.
mbrockover 6 years ago
Somewhat spontaneously attending the GF (Grammatical Framework) summer school gave me a totally different appreciation for natural language formal grammars. Now when I’m learning a foreign language I can actually look at its GF grammar and understand it in the same way I’d understand a purely functional program library. And I hope to use GF in future businesses and projects.