About: Front-end engineer from Scotland, UK.
I'm excited to be attending my first developer conference in February next year, Frontend Developer Love 2019!
I can't wait to go, there are some great speakers at the event.
As this is my first conference, I'm not sure what to expect. Does anyone have any tips? I'm hoping to get some good photos, take lots of notes, and hopefully write a few blog posts about the experience.
Thanks for this! I'll try to keep this in mind and enjoy the experience :)
I second this!!!
The first time I've been to a conference I was overwhelmed. As all of the events, speakers and/or panels appeared quite interesting I wanted to visit ALL of them, didn't wanna miss a single one! But running around from one event to another did not do any good. It only made me panic. And tired. And somehow disappointed. So yeah, what Ben said, expect to miss out on a lot of good stuff, but that's okay! Take it slow, and enjoy the show.
@ben shoutout for making a reference to Harry Potter.
Go to the talks that you expect to raise questions, or the ones about technology you're probably never going to use but you'll never get better chance to see. I've never used Erlang, but I still think about the Webmachine talk I saw years ago.
Network. Say hi. Everyone else is too scared to say hi so they'll be thankful you made the first move, even some of the experienced speakers.
Find a note style that works for you. Practice on videos from previous conferences. Sure, you've taken notes before, but you might be out of practice. Try sketch notes.
Relax and enjoy it.
HAVE FUN!!!! I went to my first conference(RubyConf) a couple months ago and now I am HOOKED! My favorite part was meeting all the awesome, amazing, like minded people. Definitely take time to try and mingle with everyone. It was hard for me bc I tend to be more introverted but I went with some more outgoing coworkers and they got me out of my shell and it was totally worth it.
One of the girls at RubyConf wrote an excellent blog post on how she handled RubyConf which was also her first conference. I really enjoyed reading it, hopefully you will as well!
Thanks Molly!
I'm not great at networking/mingling but I think we'd get a lot out of it. Thanks for sharing the blog post too, I'm going to read it just now :)
Expect to miss out on a lot of stuff and that’s okay. Soak up a portion of the “benefits” and mostly just have fun.
I always leave conferences wishing I’d been able to do the Hermione Granger trick and go to every talk and meet every person. But the talks will be online later, so mostly just enjoy yourself in the moment.