I was really happy to finally attend an IT conference, even though I was more looking for another experience. I was envisaging attending a SocRaTes event. Maybe soon I will have the opportunity. Still this one was also very interesting.
For two days there were plenty of presentations and workshops. Three or four at the same time. There were two tracks proposed by RivieraDev itself, one by JUDCon and most of the times there were also some workshops or smaller scaled presentations.
It was especially entertaining - sorry, but really - to hear what kind of problems the organizers had to face. Vendors/service providers wanted to deliver water later, print the programs the week after - so in the end there were no printed programs. Hey, that’s great for mother nature! Missing bass player at the concert and a broke down food truck on the first day. Although my badge was not prepared, I think the organizers passed their exam, well done!
So what this event added to me? After my first conference I don’t think that such an event is good for deepening your knowledge in certain specidic areas. For that presentation are either to shallow or too fast. However it provides some great opportunities:
It’s a great networking possibility. Even if you are shy, you can and should talk to many people. Even myself, I got out of my confort zone and approached a presenter during the cocktail so i could ask a bit about her robot and what she wants with it.
You can also feed your Twitter timeline. Almost every presenter put his or her Twitter username on the first slides of their presentations instead of emails, links to linkedin profiles,etc.
As I mentioned, you won’t get deep knowledge, but if you take notes you can gain a lot of ideasa and keywords to check on later. I have enough tools/languages to check for the coming months.
I also learned taht you don’t have to be so special to be a presenter. Next year I’ll also apply with some ideas!
