Almost everything is the same, only 10 times cheaper

“I’m afraid that what I’m doing is not necessary for anyone,” is quite a frequent fear of an IT specialist. There are many dead-end branches of technology in which you can develop for a long time, sit around and poking around for years, and then somehow suddenly stay at the back of the trough. Because the whole world suddenly chose another framework, another technology and a different approach.

We were surprised to learn that there are many people who would like to come to the conference not just to listen to specific people from the area of ​​interest, but to simply understand who uses what. And understand some talk in the smoking room. And generally understand what is happening.
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Since we have never engaged in "light" conferences, this all led to some kind of brain explosion.

How senior is different from junior

Historically, all of our conferences were designed for middle and senior developers. These people do not ask for leave from work to go to an IT conference: they purposefully buy it and go strictly on a weekday. Because the weekend is for family or for yourself.

Moreover, there is another fundamental difference: if June receives a ticket from a senior comrade, then senior is the person who bought this ticket with Eychar money. That is, in large companies there is a budget for training, which developers gradually consume over the year. And these are the very tickets to the conference for general development.

Do experienced developers go to the conference to learn something new? Yes and no. But rather not. Because they can study themselves without a conference. The main question is what and how. And for what.

Observing what is happening, I can say that there are three reports archetypes:

• “Look at what thing I take off for,” for example, a deep story about some particular narrow aspect of the language.
• “And there is such a thing” - usually a new technology that the speaker tried or added to the framework and talks about how to prepare it correctly.
• “Properly cook like this” is a complete little training that allows you to figure out what to do with a specific type of task.

None of this is suitable for learning, but everything is perfect for understanding where and what to take. All types of reports do not serve for immediate adoption: most often these announcements are postponed somewhere in the head as good solutions from experienced guys. And then, when a new technology becomes necessary, they unfold and help to choose the right stack for the task and quickly understand what is important and what is unimportant.

That is, each conference is a set of “hooks”, in fact, conveying information about what happens in the field and what advanced people do in such situations. In order for professionals not to waste time.

How is this different from the "universal" conference?

The fact that senior already has orientation and skills, and the same graduate students and young specialists are still open to a wider choice.

The fact that the senior'ov and their Eycharov have money and they know where to invest it effectively. And the question of choosing between a conference and a bottle of vodka is not worth it. And the rest still don’t really understand why they need to listen to some unfamiliar uncles for several hours and how it will affect their professional development.

And the most important need is that “smoking-room”, where you can communicate with everyone from the market at once, get an approximate cut and figure out what needs to be and where.

We tried to accommodate all this in the preparation of Techtrain. And make the festival a kind of demo version of our hardcore conferences. The first approach was “everything is as usual, but 10 times cheaper”. Then he changed a little.

The list of changes is:

• The day off, because it is very important to many;
• The format of the exhibition, when you need to walk more between the stands, look and talk, and not just listen to the reports;
• More nauchnopopa: if you come with your family, you can leave the family to listen or watch something common, and go talk to the bearded men yourself. Please note: our uchpop does not exclude hardcore, but is parallel to it;
• Experts from many areas. That is not a lot of semi-professional specialists, namely the best experts. Their sample will simply be wider;
• And many formats for communication when you can ask more questions.

That is, it will be possible to listen, for example, who really uses Data Science around the world and for what, what kind of toolkits are there. Look at the JS-developers and at least understand what they live and what they say in the smoking room. Find out whether it makes sense to commit to an open source for career development, and if so, how to do it better. And so on.

The resulting program can be viewed here .

This is our first festival, designed immediately for beginners and experienced engineers. We hope that if you have previously doubted whether or not to attend our events, and the words about hardcore did not convince you, now you can try. True, there is a contradiction: to make a festival, including for beginners, the degree of hardcore must be slightly lowered.

In general, we need your opinion on how to do it better. The economics of the project are as follows: we earn on the “big” Jokers and Dotneksta to be able to bring the best speakers for this format. If everything goes well, the next Techtrain will be more expensive and massive.

While this is all - a great experiment . It is important for us that beginners communicate with professionals, and professionals come to the event more as in a smoking room, plus a couple of interesting reports. Is there something that in the festival at the same time attracts and pushes you so much that you hesitate to take or not to take a ticket?