To Conference or Not to Conference?
Now that I'm moving into a new universe of development, I need to start thinking seriously about the conference circuit again. RailsConf is coming up in May in the relatively-close venue of Portland, and Amy Hoy has a roundup of some smaller Ruby conferences on her weblog today.
Certainly conferences were an important part of my personal branding strategy when I got started in coding for the Microsoft platform - but that was speaking at conferences, not just attending them. I do not think I'll be in a position to pitch myself as a speaker until very late this year, or early next. So I need to think hard about the costs of attendance. Even RailsConf would cost a couple of grand to get to, between the $800 registration, travel and hotel, and 4-5 days that I can't bill at my current rate. That's a fairly significant hit. Balance against that some incremental amount of networking and learning - incremental in that I can otherwise do some pretty decent networking and learning over the Internet.
Right now I'm inclined to think that conference attendance falls into the "luxury" category for me, and that I'd be better served by putting the time into polishing my coding skills.
Certainly conferences were an important part of my personal branding strategy when I got started in coding for the Microsoft platform - but that was speaking at conferences, not just attending them. I do not think I'll be in a position to pitch myself as a speaker until very late this year, or early next. So I need to think hard about the costs of attendance. Even RailsConf would cost a couple of grand to get to, between the $800 registration, travel and hotel, and 4-5 days that I can't bill at my current rate. That's a fairly significant hit. Balance against that some incremental amount of networking and learning - incremental in that I can otherwise do some pretty decent networking and learning over the Internet.
Right now I'm inclined to think that conference attendance falls into the "luxury" category for me, and that I'd be better served by putting the time into polishing my coding skills.