from Hacker News

Pouring one out for the end of O’Reilly’s in-person conferences

by Oculus on 3/25/20, 2:43 PM with 65 comments

• by driverdan on 3/25/20, 5:33 PM

  Quite frankly I won't miss large, overpriced, junket confs like O'Reilly's.

  They were too expensive for most people to justify attending without corporate sponsorship. The expo halls were full of enterprise sales pitches with minimal substance. They also had sponsored keynotes which tended to be sales pitches.

  If you go to meet people instead of selling your product go to smaller confs put on by local organizers.

• by jonahhorowitz on 3/25/20, 5:44 PM

  I've been going to large conferences since I started my career 20 years ago. When I was a junior engineer I found the sessions very informative, but as I developed more experience, I always got the most value hanging out in the hallway after sessions or the hotel bar at the end of the day.

  I've tried "going to" a few virtual conferences and they're basically useless. Losing these physical spaces to gather and discuss will be a huge blow to learning and collaboration.

• by ansible on 3/25/20, 6:37 PM

  This is somewhat off-topic, but has anyone else been disappointed by O'Reilly's website these days?

  I was disappointed to learn about them discontinuing the sale of individual ebooks, but sort of rolled with it by just buying them from another vendor.

  Now it seems I can only sign up for online learning. What is that? Yes, I can start a free trial, but wouldn't it be nice to know what I might want to spend $500 USD per year on? What does O'Reilly actually have these days?

  I'd prefer to save my free trial for when I'm moderately sure I'll want to stick with the service. If I don't even have an index of what's being offered, that really turns me away.

• by jedberg on 3/25/20, 7:20 PM

  This is a huge blow to our industry I think. I've attended a lot of conferences, large and small, and the hallway track is almost always the most useful part.

  I've had some of my most important collaborations start with meeting someone in the hall.

  I've met some of my best friends in conference hallways.

  I have an entire group of friends who I only ever see at conferences, because we live all over the world.

  I once got questioned entering Canada as to why I was going and I said, "to visit friends". They asked me how I could have so many friends in Canada if I've lived in California all my life. I told them, "I met them all at conferences!".

  And it's true. Every person I know in Canada I met at a conference (other than a few family members). And almost all of them have helped me professionally at one time or another as well as being good friends.

  I'm going to miss those O'Reilly hall tracks. :(

• by hinkley on 3/25/20, 6:04 PM

  When I worked on the Mosaic project, I went into my boss's office one day and his shelves had sprouted about 6 shelf-feet of O'Reilly books.

  Somehow Terry convinced some O'Reilly rep that since we were helping them sell so many books that maybe they should give us some free books. Turns out that the entire catalog was 6 feet at that particular moment. So he had every. single. O'Reilly book in print. I was not entirely gracious in my jealousy.

  A couple times a year I am reminded of the comedians and speakers I heard as a child talking about old things ending all the time, and it's been happening more and more to me. The worst is still the "Guess who died game", but that's so far about losing people I grew up with. As you can tell by the above, I kind of grew up with O'Reilly, and I hope this isn't the end of an era.

• by sybercecurity on 3/25/20, 5:27 PM

  Same with some standard development orgs as well like the IETF. The real value is in the "hallway" meetings or pop up meetings organized over a particular topic. Especially the IETF where they even admit the email list is where official work is done and not really in-person meetings.

  The use of collaboration tools like github/lab, wikis and mailing lists help a bit. Maybe we need to give Second Life a second look...

• by jhbadger on 3/25/20, 5:20 PM

  This sort of thing is true for scientific conferences as well -- that half the point isn't the talks, but connecting with potential collaborators between (or instead of) talks. With numerous conferences this year that haven't been cancelled outright shifting to online, we'll have to see if any of this networking aspect can be captured.

• by alaxsxaq on 3/25/20, 7:18 PM

  I've been going to OSCON on and off since the entire conference took place in the downtown Portland Marriott and it was a really good conference, until they moved it to Austin. From there, attendance seemed to decline yearly and the content was getting very watered down. At the 25th anniversary event back in Portland, it was startling clear that either O'Reilly was becoming disinterested in this event or there was a revenue problem. I guess a bit of both.

• by donretag on 3/26/20, 12:41 AM

  Good riddance. They would purchase great conferences, like Hadoop World which costed only $200 to attend, and turn them into $1500 affairs.

  Wish there were more very tech focused conferences in the US like Devoxx in Europe. No filler. No hidden sales pitches.

• by wenc on 3/26/20, 12:39 AM

  Developers conferences can be useful if you get to talk to the right people.

  I was given a pass to Microsoft Build one year because we were looking to build stuff on Azure but weren't sure which services were mature and which were not. I talked to almost every single PM who had a booth there (and at MS, PMs are also developers). I learned that if you push MS PMs hard enough and ask the right questions, most will drop the marketing facade and give you the insider's view. (after all, developers -- by personality trait -- generally hate two-faced marketing talk and would genuinely rather talk about the tech)

  This unfiltered insider's view is decidedly quite different from Microsoft's enterprise marketing's messaging. Attending Microsoft Build and talking to PMs helped us avoid investing our efforts in Azure services that turned out to be dead-ends. (many of Azure's GA stuff are feature complete but not truly production-ready) Short of running POCs, there exist few other low-effort means of procuring this intelligence other than by talking to (honest) Azure consultants at Meetups who have to deal with this stuff in daily production.

  My conclusion from the conference (corroborated with my own dev experience) was that the parts of Azure that were built on pre-existing Microsoft technology (like VMs and SQL Servers) were generally solid and could be relied upon.

  Whereas many new-fangled PaaS/SaaS cloud-only offerings tend not to be as battle-tested and would often fail on corner cases, so one would be prudent to think twice about putting mission-critical workloads on them. Also, one learns that despite the glossy marketing material, some Azure offerings turned to not have had any dev activity on them due to low uptake. There are still maturity issues in Azure today, and my gut feel is that most enterprises that do run on Azure mostly use their IaaS (VMs, SQL) offerings -- these are the most mature -- rather than their PaaS and SaaS offerings.

  The common refrain from marketing folks is that cloud development is a moving target, and what was true a week ago might not be true now (a trivially true statement but of no practical use).

• by frost_knight on 3/26/20, 12:42 AM

  This past February I had the honor of giving my first ever keynote presentation. The conference was sponsored by my employer. That said, aside from mentioning that I worked for said employer, I never mentioned it again nor did I try to sell anyone anything.

  I had some of the best most awesome conversations during the coffee and lunch breaks. I can only hope that I gave a fraction of insight during my keynote that I received during the hallway talks.

• by chirau on 3/25/20, 11:04 PM

  I, for one, will surely miss the O'Reilly Conferences. Very well organized and great keynote speakers. Also, you will meet a lot of interesting people in hallways, dining, social events etc. It also gives you O'Reilly Online access.

• by ChrisMarshallNY on 3/25/20, 6:33 PM

  I certainly agree about the "Hallway track." Nowadays, you can get more from a session by reviewing the video, than from being there in person.

  However, making relationships, and maintaining them, is really important. This goes double for today's distributed teams; where people may seldom get a chance to meet.

  Never been to an O'Reilly conference, but have attended many others.

  Nowadays, most conferences are too damn big and polished for me. My favorite conference of all time, was MacHack, in the late 1980s. Really scruffy, scrappy, and energizing.

• by wronglebowski on 3/25/20, 5:28 PM

  I actually was planning to attend their DevOps conference this year before COVID. My employer will sponsor one conference of my choice. Any recommendations for replacements?

• by draw_down on 3/25/20, 5:26 PM

  I never got much out of the "hallway track", myself. For the parties and socializing, I guess I prefer the company of people that don't tend to find themselves at professional technology conferences.

  If the talks don't have interesting ideas or expose me to new things, it's hard for me to get value out of a conference. It's true that you can watch a talk from anywhere, but being in the same room usually gives the talk deeper and longer-term impact, I have found.

• by itqwertz on 3/25/20, 10:43 PM

  Most conferences can be summed up in a group of blog posts. I don’t need to listen to a Diversity Evangelist tell me how to code.