Why you should attend conferences?
I’ve attended five conferences in my student life and I loved them all. I attended SciPy 2015 (my first conference), PyCon India 2015, Consilence 2016, SciPy 2016 and CyFy 2016.
Non-reasons to attend conferences:
- To (passively) attend talks
This might have been a good reason five or ten years ago, but not today. Most of the conferences upload their videos online pretty quickly, you can watch them at your time and place of your comfort.
Now, reasons to attend conferences:
- To meet and talk to new and interesting people who might be working in your area of interest
A good conference is characterized by who attends it. At SciPy I’ve met academicians, grad students, people from industry and government who are working on very wide range of areas like, geology, physics, AI, astronomy, psychology and what not. I even met a physician who uses python in his research. You can go and talk to anyone and practically about anything.
I also met many “celebrities” at conferences, people on who have written the code I regularly depend upon in my work, people who’s blog I follow and who’s book and papers I’ve read. And sometimes, after the conference, you run across someone’s work and then realize oh I’ve met this person!
You also get to absorb a lot of context at conferences. Who is attending the conference, what are they interested in, why are they interested in things they are interested in, how are they connected, where do they come from and how did they end up being here. Such conversations can give you very refreshing perspective about things, and the stories you get to hear over dinner are stories which you don’t get to hear in books, documentations or public interviews.
2. To meet old friends
At SciPy I met a large part of the SymPy team, who I’ve been working with online from a long time. Meeting them in flesh and blood, you realize that they are not just a name on a screen. Meeting them in person, you can talk about their histories, or any other random thing, things which are pretty hard to talk about online.
Similarly at PyCon India I met friend and alumni from my university who I knew from our Linux Users Group.
3. To have fun
Sometimes conferences themselves organize social events. Even if there are no especially arranged social event, you often end up at a pub with some group enjoying drinks, good music and good company. This is true for all the conferences I’ve attended, be it SciPy or the Indian conferences.
How to make most of your conference experience:
- Go prepared
See the list of the talks, see the list of speakers, look them up online, make a list of people you want to talk to and maybe also a list of things you want to talk about.
- Interact
During and after a talk ask (intelligent) questions and give any feedback or suggestion you might have. Many tech conferences have a slot for lightning talk; in a lightning talk, anyone can speak about anything for five minutes, there is no screening. Names are given during the conference itself and speakers are decided on first come first serve basis. If there is slot of lighting talk, make sure you give a lighting talk. The slots get filled up pretty quickly so give your name at the earliest. Lightning talks are a great way to introduce you and your work to the audience.
I know that giving lightning talk sounds intimidating, it was for me, but it is totally worth doing. You’ll rationalize that others will not find your work important enough or interesting enough, or you’ll tell yourself I’ll do it next time, destroy those excuses and just do it. If you are absolutely sure that you have not done any work to talk about, talk about your favorite dessert, because you can actually talk about anything. See SciPy 2014’s waffle talk for inspiration :).
