Networking at Conferences

I often say that developers should always attend local meetups and conferences. It's not for the knowledge. You can get knowledge anywhere - Internet, YouTube, blogs. Even most conferences themselves will release the talk videos.

The main point of attending a conference is to meet other developers. Developing connections in the industry, learning what others are working on, finding opportunities (jobs/clients/partnerships) are really important and help your career down the line. Full time developers don't spend time on this. It's really important to get out of the cocoon of the current project and see what is going on elsewhere.

One of the nice things about PyCon Italia is how they structured the conference around plenty of opportunities for socialising. To start with, the lunch break was 2 hours instead of the 1 hour breaks that I am familiar with. Then, at the end of every day there was a socialising event for the participants. And there were side events during the conference hours as well. This was apart from the regular hallway conversations that happen in any conference. There were also plenty of sitting areas in the common areas, so it was very easy to have side conversations. These were definitely some takeaways for me, for any future conference.