Worthwhile Industry Trade Shows for Developers and Admins?

PacketMaster asks: "This year I attended JavaOne in San Francisco. Working for a company that uses Java as its primary programming platform, we thought this would be a good show to attend. While there were good nuggets of information gleaned from these shows, a lot of the talks were 'Today we're going to look at X and then show you how to implement it in {INSERT PRODUCT}.' Basically the whole show was a continuous Sun sales pitch! We're in budget planning time and we're discussing what shows we want to go to this year. What are some recommended shows that are actually useful for either programmers using open source applications like Linux and MySQL, the Java environment or systems administrators using Unix?" In today's belt-tightening economy, many companies don't have much money to waste on sending their employees to shows that will waste their time. What conventions and trade shows actually offer useful information rather than trying to indoctrinate their attendees on commercial products they may not want or need?

Comments

trade shows

[spike666]

i think you will be hard pressed to find a trade show that is meaningful for developers. MOST trade shows are meant to push product, not technology per se.

the best bet is to go to those trade shows for ideas and attend the seminars trying to see a) how the technology could be helpful to your work b) how you could leverage it at your environment.

especially in the java world, you can mostly use the same techniques across differing Java Application Servers (aka Tomcat, Resin) the only time it gets harder is on the differing EJB servers. and even then you can still leverage the similar technologies, the deployment bits are the things that change, not the code.

another HUGE place to get java ideas is online. i use ibm's Developerworks and that has different sections on xml, java, web services. (as well as linux and open source) other good java sites include ONJava and the java publications like Javaworld or the java portal Javaskyline

O'Reilly

[Anonymous Coward]

I've attended the O'Reilly Open Source conference for the last 3 years and have found it to be one of the best conferences. It is usually structured as 2 days of half-day tutorials, and then 2 or 3 days of 'conference' sessions; shorter presentations, papers, etc.

However, its focus is mostly Perl, Python, and Apache, with some sendmail, *BSD, MySQL, Postgres, Linux etc. thrown in.

O'reilly has conferences on other topics too, but I can't speak for how good they are. You might check http://conferences.oreilly.com and see if there's anything of interest.

SD (Software Development) East

[humblecoder]

I went to this conference two years ago, and I thought it was excellent. It is sponsored by a magazine publisher, I believe, so it is pretty much technology and company agnostic. Also, there were a lot of in-depth technical sessions (the one I went to suggested that participants bring laptops with compilers), so it was a lot more than just a sales pitch type of thing. You actually got some good technical know-how from it.

I believe there is also a SD conference on the West Coast (SD West?), so that may be more geographically convienent. From what I understand, it is basically the same conference.

LISA!

[Matthew Weigel]

LISA is the conference for sysadmins. I went last year, and I was very impressed with the quality of the tutorials, and some of the papers were very interesting as well (and, if nothing else, most of the papers center around how different people solved different problems, so you are exposed to a wide variety of techniques). USENIX Technical Conference is an excellent Unix-oriented programming conference, as well.