How to stop attending the conference as a participant and start speaking? Tips from Andrei Akinshin
On the eve of the DUMP conference , we decided to talk to the speakers about the development, their work and life. We interviewed the first interview with one of the best Russian speakers Andrei Akinshin.
Andrey Akinshin ( @DreamWalker ) - Rider developer at JetBrains, project manager for the BenchmarkDotNet project (library for writing .NET benchmarks, supported by the .NET Foundation), .NET MVP, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, silver winner of ACM ICPC.
Andrei is the speaker of many developer events and the chairman of the DotNext conference program committee. In an interview, Andrei told how to collect material, how to prepare for the report, how to make interesting slides and why go to the conference at all.
')
Andrey Akinshin is the speaker of many conferences. For example, one of the last speeches - “Let's talk about arithmetic” .
- How did you start performing?
It all began in an academic environment: at the university and graduate school I spoke a lot at various scientific conferences, where I gained the first experience of speaking before an audience. But the topics were quite narrow: I talked about the theory of bifurcations and molecular biology. There were a lot of benefits for me: I learned to systematize the results of my own research and present them in a more or less accessible form.
However, over time, I began to realize that there was not so much benefit for the listeners: people slightly broadened their own erudition, but nothing more. At this time, I gradually began to accumulate knowledge and experience in software development. At some point I caught myself thinking that I had learned many interesting and useful facts that some of my colleagues do not know about. And there was a desire to distribute useful information already in the IT-environment, to tell what people are really interested in listening to.
“Why speak at conferences at all?”
Here everyone decides for himself. I just like sharing knowledge. I want the programmers around me to be highly qualified and write good quality code, this will allow the industry to grow faster. We constantly use the products of our colleagues' work: from libraries for direct work, to applications that we use every day. Therefore, it is natural to want these people to understand what they are doing and write productive and stable programs. By virtue of my modest possibilities, I try to tell people about different interesting things and motivate them to develop themselves.
Of course, there are many other motivations to speak. Someone wants to get a deeper understanding of the topic (when you try to prepare a good report, you always learn a lot of new things), someone wants to become famous, someone wants with the help of conferences to get the boss to improve or get into a cool company. I am sure that there are many other reasons.
- How do you prepare for performances? Maybe there is some kind of training algorithm or life hacking?
The main life hacking - you need to prepare for a long time. No matter how much time I spend on training, it is always not enough. There are always many places where something could be improved, but, alas, life does not allow you to prepare endlessly.
The preparation algorithm is simple. First you need to choose a good topic. It is desirable that you like this theme yourself (otherwise the magic will not work) and that you understand it well (or would like to understand well). The theme should be such that other developers would be interested to listen to it. Next, you throw in a rough plan and start working on it: you build the structure of the report, look for good examples, draw illustrations.
After the formation of the first draft, an iterative process of test runs and improvements begins: you need to tell the report to people, get feedback, improve something, tell again, receive feedback again, and so on. At the very end, there is a multi-iteration reading of the slides and fine grinding.
A very important stage: analysis of the performance results. At large conferences, listeners are always asked to leave feedback for speakers, from which you always learn a lot of new things. It is necessary to understand where the main mistakes were in order not to repeat them at the next performances. Unfortunately, you will not please everyone: if a lot of people came to the report, there will always be people who do not like the report. Even the most popular speakers at the coolest conferences have a portion of negative feedback. On the one hand, it is necessary to take it as a natural phenomenon, and on the other - to work actively to please the maximum listeners and minimize the percentage of negative reviews.
- What advice will you give to those who are worried during performances? Do you worry yourself and how do you cope?
When I started speaking at large conferences I was worried. With experience, the excitement becomes less, but it still does not completely go away. I think this is normal: it is strange to be 100% sure that everything will go well and everyone will like the report. A certain level of excitement makes you look critically at your own material and constantly look for places that can be improved.
If a person is worried strongly, then the advice is simple: you just need to be well prepared. The report should be entirely in your head, you need to tell it as a rhyme. If you do a lot of report runs (no matter to whom: friends, colleagues, a mirror or a rubber duck), then after the first few minutes of the speech, you switch to autopilot mode: the report is somehow told, you will not notice how the performance ends, because you fully concentrate on the content.
Video reports Andrei on YouTube
- How to make interesting slides?
This is a whole science. There is a good reminder , it has a lot of useful tips on how to properly make a presentation. As a rule, experience is needed to make good slides. If not, then it is better to send a presentation to the conference organizers in advance so that they can make a constructive feedback.
The main advice is simple: slides should help listeners understand what you are telling. A good slide is not one to which there is nothing to add, but one from which there is nothing to remove.
I usually have this scheme: I put all the content that I have in the presentation in general, and then I start to clean it methodically. If there is at least one character on the slide, without which the slide will not become worse, then it must be removed (especially for examples with code). Ruthlessly remove all information noise.
After there are only things left on the slides, without which there is absolutely no way, you need to simplify the process of understanding slides for the listeners. If there is a lot of content, then the slide should be divided into several or add animations that will illustrate your flight of thought.
You need to be very careful about the choice of fonts and colors: absolutely all design elements should carry the meaning and help the audience to understand what is happening.
It is also important not to overload the audience: no one is able to perceive a whole report as a stream of important information, in which each character carries a payload. But this should be done not through hack-work in the main part, but due to special auxiliary slides, which are needed specifically for the audience to rest. For example, it can be a slide with the title of the presentation section (it helps to build a good report structure) or a funny picture from the Internet.
I make almost all of my presentations in LaTeX and keep the version history in a git repository. It can be very interesting to look at the end of the life story of an individual slide: sometimes it has several dozens of revisions with fairly minor revisions.
- How do you type material for reports? And how do you understand that “here with this topic” you need to speak?
Usually the idea comes from practice: at work I constantly encounter various interesting tasks, the knowledge base is replenished with cool facts. When there are several such facts from one area, I begin to test them slowly on acquaintances: I will come to visit friends in the evening, we sit in the kitchen for a cup of tea, and I like this: “Guys, I recently learned an interesting feature of the latest generation of Intel processors ... "And watch the reaction. If all of a sudden it turns out that it was interesting to friends (and this is far from every time), then I understand that you can try to tell this to a wider audience. But, of course, the collection of material at this moment is just beginning: you need to read a lot of books on the relevant topic, look through all the questions on StackOverflow, and perform a certain amount of research yourself.
- You speak a lot at Russian and international conferences. Do you see the difference between presentations at Russian and foreign conferences? Do you see the difference in the audience? In the organisation?
I got the impression that simple conferences are easier to come up at foreign conferences. You can do a lot of speeches like “Introduction to technology X”, and they will be normally received by the audience. Our people (especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg) are more fond of complex reports, so that there is a lot of exclusive material that you can't figure out for yourself. But this is a highly averaged trend: in fact, everything depends on how actively the local community is: somewhere, normal conferences are held once a year, and somewhere several times a month. Of course, the expectations of the audience are very different.
By organization it is even more difficult to judge: it all depends not on the country, but on the specific people who are doing the conference. Everywhere you can find small local conferences with a low level, and very cool with top speakers and very decent organization.
- Surely you have more invitations to speak at conferences than you have time for this. How do you choose where to go and where not?
Mainly, it all depends on whether I have good material and the ability to go. If there is a suitable idea for a performance and a bit of free time on the announced dates, then why not speak. Sometimes it turns out that several conferences are held in different cities with an interval of several days, then I arrange a whole tour for myself. For example, last spring it turned out that in two weeks I spoke in 5 different cities (and everywhere on different topics). There are many additional factors: for example, the opportunity to roll up in an interesting place or see old friends. Or just a very good conference (performances on DotNext are planned for about a year).
Andrey has an excellent blog for programmers.
- Troy Hunt in his blog listed 10 ways for the organizer to upset the speaker . And what is your top 5 bathert from the preparation for the conference?
I think that the most important thing is to make the listeners happy. I come to each report in advance and conduct a site check: there should be normal acoustics (the speaker should be audible), normal lighting (the presentation should be visible), the equipment should work properly. Sometimes problems can be dealt with somehow (for example, to speak very loudly so that people in the back rows can hear everything), but, alas, not always.
As for the comfort of the speaker himself, here I am not particularly picky (I had to perform in a variety of conditions), but there must be some reasonable minimum so that the surrounding reality does not interfere with the performance. For example, if the report has a live demo, then it is highly desirable to have a microphone-buttonhole. It looks very funny when the speaker tries to simultaneously type something on the keyboard and somehow hold the microphone so that he can comment on what is happening.
Frustrating problems with the equipment. Sometimes it happens that the projector fails at the most inopportune moment. This is good if the problem can be solved in a couple of minutes, but sometimes it can easily take half an hour. At this time, it is desirable to entertain the audience somehow: such an impromptu does not always work out well (considering that there are no themes and you don’t know even after how much the projector will be repaired). Someone from the audience treats with understanding, and someone is very angry at the speaker for the fact that he spends airtime on some distant conversations. And after the conference, it may turn out that the video could not be recorded. For some reason, some listeners also blame the speaker, not the organizers.
- Did you have any epic files at conferences? Late on the plane / deleted the presentation / no one came to your report / could not find "your" room?
Epic was not, but there were many small ones. Each such file is a valuable lesson for the future. For example, I usually have a final presentation file on a pair of flash drives and in a dropbox. If something goes wrong with a laptop on duty, I often have a couple of laptops in reserve. Or, say, before a performance, it is imperative to lay out the phone and remove it somewhere (it can interfere with recordings + someone will definitely call during a speech).
- You are a member of the DotNext conference program committee. What does this give you? What is the most difficult thing about a program director? And the most fun?
The DotNext program committee is a very entertaining activity that has to be spent a lot of time. Today the committee consists of 6 people who are constantly working on the program.
Once a week we hold an online rally for a couple of hours: we review all applications for reports and discuss each in detail. We invite those speakers who are interested in us to our slack and begin work: we think over the structure of the report, its positioning and practical significance. As soon as the first draft of the presentation is ready, we begin to make online runs of the report. Sometimes it takes 6–7 rehearsals before we are ready to release the speaker on the stage.
The next DotNext conference (May 19–20 in St. Petersburg) will last two days, and we want to form a program of 32 reports. And now the hottest stage of preparation: runs almost every day: we inspect the report of each speaker, help him make beautiful slides, give tips on how to organize the material, what to focus on, what is better to throw out. Preparing so much content is not easy. Of course, we have different jambs and oversights, but after each conference we carefully analyze them and try not to allow them anymore. Therefore, the level of the conference increases noticeably from time to time.
The most exciting thing here is that you manage to influence the creation of a decent .NET conference. Perhaps it is not always possible to make the right decisions, but I want to believe that my modest contribution really helps to raise the level of the event.
- How do you manage to work, prepare for your own speeches and participate in the program committee? Are you able to keep work & life balance? Share time management secrets.
Over time, it is always difficult. In addition to work, personal life, speeches and organizing conferences, I still do Open Source (BennetmarkDotNet project to Maintainers), sometimes I write posts to the blog and try to do science (theorems are not proved as actively as before, but the process is gradually proceeding). Alas, there is not much time to sleep. You have to thoughtfully plan your own employment for many days ahead. However, no matter how great the plan is, always something goes wrong.
Say, tonight a critical bug will be found in the rider that needs to be fixed urgently. Tomorrow evening, I accidentally stumble upon a very fascinating chapter in Intel's specifications, which you definitely need to learn up to three nights. And the day after tomorrow I’ll get completely tired of this life, close my laptop and go for a walk with my friends. Therefore, the most important thing in planning is to allocate the right amount of time into the category “suddenly.” If you don’t lie to yourself and honestly admit how much “suddenly” it will most likely take, then it turns out to build a realistic enough plan and get everything done on time.
- Many people think like this: “Why go somewhere at all? For the money, I will buy several books, and you can always chat online. ” Why do you think participants need to attend the conference?
I believe that personal communication with cool guys can not be replaced with books and online chat. First of all, at the conference, you can personally communicate with the speakers. For example, on the upcoming DotNext will be John Skit. You will be able to approach him after the performance, say “Hello, John!” And just chat for the life. And this is very cool! At a good conference among the speakers there are a lot of cool specialists who can give useful tips.
In addition to the speakers at the conference, there are many other cool developers who can also talk and share experiences. You can discuss the problems that torment you for a long time (once again: it is often much more effective than online communication) and make valuable contacts. You can find like-minded people and argue till the morning about the most correct approaches to programming.
The conference is a concentrated flow of knowledge from various areas. Yes, you can see the reports and at home. But how often do you do this?Usually, people come home after work, and there a lot of important things await them: you need to have dinner, rest after dinner, pet the cat, read the news on the Internet, look out the window and think about how to live. And there it’s time to sleep, viewing useful reports is postponed until tomorrow. I conducted a survey among friends, the most active of them watch about one informative video per week, there is not enough time for more. And at the conference, one or two days you get new useful information from morning to evening. This not only develops many well, but also thoroughly motivates for further self-development.
Therefore, attending conferences is not only an exciting pastime with smart people, but also a good investment in your own professional development. I wish everyone to attend good events, and for my part I will try to make these events really exciting and useful.
In the fall, Andrey came to the meeting of the .NET community of Yekaterinburg with the report “Theory and practice of .NET benchmarking”.
You can talk with Andrey and ask your questions on April 14 at the DUMP conference . Andrey will tell about the long-awaited .NET cross-platform, its capabilities and impossibilities at the current moment.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the general sponsor - the company E-SoftPartners of the conference - SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank-Technology .
Photos: DotNext, .NET community of Yekaterinburg
Andrey Akinshin ( @DreamWalker ) - Rider developer at JetBrains, project manager for the BenchmarkDotNet project (library for writing .NET benchmarks, supported by the .NET Foundation), .NET MVP, candidate of physical and mathematical sciences, silver winner of ACM ICPC.
Andrei is the speaker of many developer events and the chairman of the DotNext conference program committee. In an interview, Andrei told how to collect material, how to prepare for the report, how to make interesting slides and why go to the conference at all.
')
Andrey Akinshin is the speaker of many conferences. For example, one of the last speeches - “Let's talk about arithmetic” .
- How did you start performing?
It all began in an academic environment: at the university and graduate school I spoke a lot at various scientific conferences, where I gained the first experience of speaking before an audience. But the topics were quite narrow: I talked about the theory of bifurcations and molecular biology. There were a lot of benefits for me: I learned to systematize the results of my own research and present them in a more or less accessible form.
However, over time, I began to realize that there was not so much benefit for the listeners: people slightly broadened their own erudition, but nothing more. At this time, I gradually began to accumulate knowledge and experience in software development. At some point I caught myself thinking that I had learned many interesting and useful facts that some of my colleagues do not know about. And there was a desire to distribute useful information already in the IT-environment, to tell what people are really interested in listening to.
“Why speak at conferences at all?”
Here everyone decides for himself. I just like sharing knowledge. I want the programmers around me to be highly qualified and write good quality code, this will allow the industry to grow faster. We constantly use the products of our colleagues' work: from libraries for direct work, to applications that we use every day. Therefore, it is natural to want these people to understand what they are doing and write productive and stable programs. By virtue of my modest possibilities, I try to tell people about different interesting things and motivate them to develop themselves.
Of course, there are many other motivations to speak. Someone wants to get a deeper understanding of the topic (when you try to prepare a good report, you always learn a lot of new things), someone wants to become famous, someone wants with the help of conferences to get the boss to improve or get into a cool company. I am sure that there are many other reasons.
- How do you prepare for performances? Maybe there is some kind of training algorithm or life hacking?
The main life hacking - you need to prepare for a long time. No matter how much time I spend on training, it is always not enough. There are always many places where something could be improved, but, alas, life does not allow you to prepare endlessly.
The preparation algorithm is simple. First you need to choose a good topic. It is desirable that you like this theme yourself (otherwise the magic will not work) and that you understand it well (or would like to understand well). The theme should be such that other developers would be interested to listen to it. Next, you throw in a rough plan and start working on it: you build the structure of the report, look for good examples, draw illustrations.
After the formation of the first draft, an iterative process of test runs and improvements begins: you need to tell the report to people, get feedback, improve something, tell again, receive feedback again, and so on. At the very end, there is a multi-iteration reading of the slides and fine grinding.
A very important stage: analysis of the performance results. At large conferences, listeners are always asked to leave feedback for speakers, from which you always learn a lot of new things. It is necessary to understand where the main mistakes were in order not to repeat them at the next performances. Unfortunately, you will not please everyone: if a lot of people came to the report, there will always be people who do not like the report. Even the most popular speakers at the coolest conferences have a portion of negative feedback. On the one hand, it is necessary to take it as a natural phenomenon, and on the other - to work actively to please the maximum listeners and minimize the percentage of negative reviews.
- What advice will you give to those who are worried during performances? Do you worry yourself and how do you cope?
When I started speaking at large conferences I was worried. With experience, the excitement becomes less, but it still does not completely go away. I think this is normal: it is strange to be 100% sure that everything will go well and everyone will like the report. A certain level of excitement makes you look critically at your own material and constantly look for places that can be improved.
If a person is worried strongly, then the advice is simple: you just need to be well prepared. The report should be entirely in your head, you need to tell it as a rhyme. If you do a lot of report runs (no matter to whom: friends, colleagues, a mirror or a rubber duck), then after the first few minutes of the speech, you switch to autopilot mode: the report is somehow told, you will not notice how the performance ends, because you fully concentrate on the content.
Video reports Andrei on YouTube
- How to make interesting slides?
This is a whole science. There is a good reminder , it has a lot of useful tips on how to properly make a presentation. As a rule, experience is needed to make good slides. If not, then it is better to send a presentation to the conference organizers in advance so that they can make a constructive feedback.
The main advice is simple: slides should help listeners understand what you are telling. A good slide is not one to which there is nothing to add, but one from which there is nothing to remove.
I usually have this scheme: I put all the content that I have in the presentation in general, and then I start to clean it methodically. If there is at least one character on the slide, without which the slide will not become worse, then it must be removed (especially for examples with code). Ruthlessly remove all information noise.
After there are only things left on the slides, without which there is absolutely no way, you need to simplify the process of understanding slides for the listeners. If there is a lot of content, then the slide should be divided into several or add animations that will illustrate your flight of thought.
You need to be very careful about the choice of fonts and colors: absolutely all design elements should carry the meaning and help the audience to understand what is happening.
It is also important not to overload the audience: no one is able to perceive a whole report as a stream of important information, in which each character carries a payload. But this should be done not through hack-work in the main part, but due to special auxiliary slides, which are needed specifically for the audience to rest. For example, it can be a slide with the title of the presentation section (it helps to build a good report structure) or a funny picture from the Internet.
I make almost all of my presentations in LaTeX and keep the version history in a git repository. It can be very interesting to look at the end of the life story of an individual slide: sometimes it has several dozens of revisions with fairly minor revisions.
- How do you type material for reports? And how do you understand that “here with this topic” you need to speak?
Usually the idea comes from practice: at work I constantly encounter various interesting tasks, the knowledge base is replenished with cool facts. When there are several such facts from one area, I begin to test them slowly on acquaintances: I will come to visit friends in the evening, we sit in the kitchen for a cup of tea, and I like this: “Guys, I recently learned an interesting feature of the latest generation of Intel processors ... "And watch the reaction. If all of a sudden it turns out that it was interesting to friends (and this is far from every time), then I understand that you can try to tell this to a wider audience. But, of course, the collection of material at this moment is just beginning: you need to read a lot of books on the relevant topic, look through all the questions on StackOverflow, and perform a certain amount of research yourself.
- You speak a lot at Russian and international conferences. Do you see the difference between presentations at Russian and foreign conferences? Do you see the difference in the audience? In the organisation?
I got the impression that simple conferences are easier to come up at foreign conferences. You can do a lot of speeches like “Introduction to technology X”, and they will be normally received by the audience. Our people (especially in Moscow and St. Petersburg) are more fond of complex reports, so that there is a lot of exclusive material that you can't figure out for yourself. But this is a highly averaged trend: in fact, everything depends on how actively the local community is: somewhere, normal conferences are held once a year, and somewhere several times a month. Of course, the expectations of the audience are very different.
By organization it is even more difficult to judge: it all depends not on the country, but on the specific people who are doing the conference. Everywhere you can find small local conferences with a low level, and very cool with top speakers and very decent organization.
- Surely you have more invitations to speak at conferences than you have time for this. How do you choose where to go and where not?
Mainly, it all depends on whether I have good material and the ability to go. If there is a suitable idea for a performance and a bit of free time on the announced dates, then why not speak. Sometimes it turns out that several conferences are held in different cities with an interval of several days, then I arrange a whole tour for myself. For example, last spring it turned out that in two weeks I spoke in 5 different cities (and everywhere on different topics). There are many additional factors: for example, the opportunity to roll up in an interesting place or see old friends. Or just a very good conference (performances on DotNext are planned for about a year).
Andrey has an excellent blog for programmers.
- Troy Hunt in his blog listed 10 ways for the organizer to upset the speaker . And what is your top 5 bathert from the preparation for the conference?
I think that the most important thing is to make the listeners happy. I come to each report in advance and conduct a site check: there should be normal acoustics (the speaker should be audible), normal lighting (the presentation should be visible), the equipment should work properly. Sometimes problems can be dealt with somehow (for example, to speak very loudly so that people in the back rows can hear everything), but, alas, not always.
As for the comfort of the speaker himself, here I am not particularly picky (I had to perform in a variety of conditions), but there must be some reasonable minimum so that the surrounding reality does not interfere with the performance. For example, if the report has a live demo, then it is highly desirable to have a microphone-buttonhole. It looks very funny when the speaker tries to simultaneously type something on the keyboard and somehow hold the microphone so that he can comment on what is happening.
Frustrating problems with the equipment. Sometimes it happens that the projector fails at the most inopportune moment. This is good if the problem can be solved in a couple of minutes, but sometimes it can easily take half an hour. At this time, it is desirable to entertain the audience somehow: such an impromptu does not always work out well (considering that there are no themes and you don’t know even after how much the projector will be repaired). Someone from the audience treats with understanding, and someone is very angry at the speaker for the fact that he spends airtime on some distant conversations. And after the conference, it may turn out that the video could not be recorded. For some reason, some listeners also blame the speaker, not the organizers.
- Did you have any epic files at conferences? Late on the plane / deleted the presentation / no one came to your report / could not find "your" room?
Epic was not, but there were many small ones. Each such file is a valuable lesson for the future. For example, I usually have a final presentation file on a pair of flash drives and in a dropbox. If something goes wrong with a laptop on duty, I often have a couple of laptops in reserve. Or, say, before a performance, it is imperative to lay out the phone and remove it somewhere (it can interfere with recordings + someone will definitely call during a speech).
- You are a member of the DotNext conference program committee. What does this give you? What is the most difficult thing about a program director? And the most fun?
The DotNext program committee is a very entertaining activity that has to be spent a lot of time. Today the committee consists of 6 people who are constantly working on the program.
Once a week we hold an online rally for a couple of hours: we review all applications for reports and discuss each in detail. We invite those speakers who are interested in us to our slack and begin work: we think over the structure of the report, its positioning and practical significance. As soon as the first draft of the presentation is ready, we begin to make online runs of the report. Sometimes it takes 6–7 rehearsals before we are ready to release the speaker on the stage.
The next DotNext conference (May 19–20 in St. Petersburg) will last two days, and we want to form a program of 32 reports. And now the hottest stage of preparation: runs almost every day: we inspect the report of each speaker, help him make beautiful slides, give tips on how to organize the material, what to focus on, what is better to throw out. Preparing so much content is not easy. Of course, we have different jambs and oversights, but after each conference we carefully analyze them and try not to allow them anymore. Therefore, the level of the conference increases noticeably from time to time.
The most exciting thing here is that you manage to influence the creation of a decent .NET conference. Perhaps it is not always possible to make the right decisions, but I want to believe that my modest contribution really helps to raise the level of the event.
- How do you manage to work, prepare for your own speeches and participate in the program committee? Are you able to keep work & life balance? Share time management secrets.
Over time, it is always difficult. In addition to work, personal life, speeches and organizing conferences, I still do Open Source (BennetmarkDotNet project to Maintainers), sometimes I write posts to the blog and try to do science (theorems are not proved as actively as before, but the process is gradually proceeding). Alas, there is not much time to sleep. You have to thoughtfully plan your own employment for many days ahead. However, no matter how great the plan is, always something goes wrong.
Say, tonight a critical bug will be found in the rider that needs to be fixed urgently. Tomorrow evening, I accidentally stumble upon a very fascinating chapter in Intel's specifications, which you definitely need to learn up to three nights. And the day after tomorrow I’ll get completely tired of this life, close my laptop and go for a walk with my friends. Therefore, the most important thing in planning is to allocate the right amount of time into the category “suddenly.” If you don’t lie to yourself and honestly admit how much “suddenly” it will most likely take, then it turns out to build a realistic enough plan and get everything done on time.
- Many people think like this: “Why go somewhere at all? For the money, I will buy several books, and you can always chat online. ” Why do you think participants need to attend the conference?
I believe that personal communication with cool guys can not be replaced with books and online chat. First of all, at the conference, you can personally communicate with the speakers. For example, on the upcoming DotNext will be John Skit. You will be able to approach him after the performance, say “Hello, John!” And just chat for the life. And this is very cool! At a good conference among the speakers there are a lot of cool specialists who can give useful tips.
In addition to the speakers at the conference, there are many other cool developers who can also talk and share experiences. You can discuss the problems that torment you for a long time (once again: it is often much more effective than online communication) and make valuable contacts. You can find like-minded people and argue till the morning about the most correct approaches to programming.
The conference is a concentrated flow of knowledge from various areas. Yes, you can see the reports and at home. But how often do you do this?Usually, people come home after work, and there a lot of important things await them: you need to have dinner, rest after dinner, pet the cat, read the news on the Internet, look out the window and think about how to live. And there it’s time to sleep, viewing useful reports is postponed until tomorrow. I conducted a survey among friends, the most active of them watch about one informative video per week, there is not enough time for more. And at the conference, one or two days you get new useful information from morning to evening. This not only develops many well, but also thoroughly motivates for further self-development.
Therefore, attending conferences is not only an exciting pastime with smart people, but also a good investment in your own professional development. I wish everyone to attend good events, and for my part I will try to make these events really exciting and useful.
In the fall, Andrey came to the meeting of the .NET community of Yekaterinburg with the report “Theory and practice of .NET benchmarking”.
You can talk with Andrey and ask your questions on April 14 at the DUMP conference . Andrey will tell about the long-awaited .NET cross-platform, its capabilities and impossibilities at the current moment.
Thanks to our sponsors who make the conference possible: the general sponsor - the company E-SoftPartners of the conference - SKB Kontur , Naumen , Sberbank-Technology .
Photos: DotNext, .NET community of Yekaterinburg
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/324352/
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