You should go to conferences

I’m currently in a train going to DrupalCon Barcelona, so I thought it was the best moment to respond (not really a response, more like a related post) to a blog post from Localghost I meant to write about when I read it. Its titlte is “You should go to conferences”. She seems to go and speak to many conferences per year (>4) and basically advice people to go to them. Both for the talks themselves and of course for meeting the communities.

Conferences and in particular opensource related conferences have always interested me… But I never went on my own to any of them… I know, that’s a bit sad, but in the end, I’m only going to one per year, which is Drupal Con. And I’m going because I’m sent by the company I’m working for. And some year I may also be sent to other Drupal related events. But again, not from my own initiative.

It isn’t that I didn’t find any interesting conferences to go to, on the opposite. I’ve always wanted to go to JdLL for example. But there is always something stopping me. Sometimes real reasons (like family reunion, travelling for work, etc…), sometimes less good reasons. I’ve not been to Capitol Du Libre last year even though I wanted to and it was very close to where I live.

Of course, one of the reason is that none of my close ones (friends or familly) are nerds into those subjects like me. The only friend that could be interested (mostly to be nice with me) has 3 young children and have no time to disapear for such events for a few days.

I’m neither afraid of socializing, talking to people or even staying alone… I’m not afraid about going to events alone either, I’ve been to a couple of concerts on my own (little concerts of less than 200 people that noone else in my entourage enjoyed). So I’m really unsure why I haven’t actually been to one yet… Am I just lazy or is there something else blocking me? Who knows!

I even thought multiple time about joining some of the IndieWeb online meeting over Zoom when I was lurking on their IRC channel, but never actually joined. It doesn’t help that it is usually at dinner time for me and my partner. And happens on zoom where I refuse to switch on my camera (even for work, I don’t put my camera on proprietary platforms).

Maybe this year will be the year with the Capitole Du Libre 2024 (mid November), or any others… Maybe not -.o.- . Most of the time, I like watching recordings of the talks I like, I can more easily move around the video, speed it up or stop it if I’m not interested. I wouldn’t leave the room if I were there though, as I’ve been a speaker to big events before, I lnow it isn’t great when you see the attendees leaving. I’m jalous of all the nice stickers and goodies people bring back from those events though!

Anyway, this post does not have any objective, it is just a bit of rambling about this subject as I was thinking about it since I read the mentioned blog post above. Being on the train and thinking about this made me start writing… without an end goal.

I’ve also learned about the “pacman rule” at conference from that post, a way of standing in group in an always open manner to invite people to join your group. I’m going to try that this week :).

PS: I’m not sure, but I think this would be the first real post I’m posting from outside my house, making useful my overly complex deployment workflow… Yay :).