What IT conferences should I budget this year?

April 10, 2012 4:50 PM

What IT/programming/technology type conferences should I try to go to this year (June 2012 - June 2013)? I have to come up with a list of 3 by Thursday for my manager!

I'm primarily a software developer who also does some OS X and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server management, and a little bit of Oracle administration (for a vendor app we use; most of my stuff stores its data in MySQL). What language I'm using on any given day depends on what platform I'm developing for:

OS X: C/Objective-C; perl for quick tasks
Linux: PHP, Java, and some Ruby on Rails; perl and bash for quick tasks
Windows: C# and some straight C/C++ with the bare Win32 API

A lot of what I write are "glue" or "integration" programs that help tie our various vendor apps together.

So beyond the obvious (WWDC), where should I go? In previous years I've been to YAPC and ApacheCon. I tried to go to RubyConf but missed the registration deadline (miscommunications on my part). I've been doing a lot of WordPress related stuff this year so a WP internals conference would be dandy (how to write plugins well). Also, if there's some good Oracle training that would be beneficial.

Budget is ~$3000 for registration, hotel, and travel. I work in Higher Education so anything with a bent towards that is good. Other than Oracle, the training type conferences where it's "Here's how to write programs in X language" don't interest me because I'm a good enough programmer to pickup any language I need to in short time. WRT language conferences I'm more interested in "Here's a framework you should be using. Here's major changes that are upcoming. Etc."

posted by The Supreme Dominar to technology (5 answers total)

I was just thinking sitting here, if it's worthwhile something like this jQuery conference is what I'm looking for. I think I might put that down...
posted by The Supreme Dominar at 4:53 PM on April 10, 2012

OSCON or OSBC - both conference oriented to open source in general.

OSCON is larger and more technical - in Portland
OSBC is smaller and more business oriented - in San Francisco
posted by bottlebrushtree at 4:54 PM on April 10, 2012

You might also want to look around on http://lanyrd.com/ which is a "social" conference directory. I've found a ton of small interesting conferences there.
posted by bottlebrushtree at 4:55 PM on April 10, 2012

I'm headed to OSCON (because it makes sense for my employer) and DEFCON (because I enjoy hating the experience of being in Las Vegas), probably.

You might want to look into local "unconferences" and the like, if you haven't - there may be good things happening in your area that will cost you somewhere between nothing and very little to attend.
posted by brennen at 4:58 PM on April 10, 2012

Any WordCamps in your area will be helpful, especially if they can get any of the core team there.
posted by chrisfromthelc at 11:01 PM on April 10, 2012