Last Friday I went to the StackOver Flow Dev day in Cambridge. The day was arranged by Carsonified and hosted by Joel Spolsky of Fogbugz. I had never been to a Carsonified event so I was keen to see what the buzz was about.

On the face of it the schedule looked good, there were talks planned on jQuery, Python, .NET MVC and security. I took one of my lead developers with me  so we could both benefit and report back to the rest of the team. At the end of the day when the talks were over I was left feeling really disappointed, I thought it might just have been me but as I was talking to people they were all saying the same thing… the day felt like one big advert.

Now I would not have minded if this was a free seminar but we paid £85 each to be there. A large part of the day was devoted to Joel plugging his various services, Stack Overflow and associated products, his conferences and Fogbugz, I felt like I had paid to be part of an advert. That is not to say there were some good talks; Christian Heilmann from Yahoo was superb and introduced me to many Yahoo developer tools that I had never heard of (I will blog about these in the coming days).

The day got me thinking about how we spend our time at conferences and meetings. We need to treat it more like a business transaction as conferences cost money to attend (travel, food, hotel, ticket entry), as well as the opportunity cost of staff not working on billable projects. This cost is fine if the knowledge, connections and morale boost you get from a conference exceeds the monetary cost. But do people measure the ROI of going to conferences? Do you plan which conferences you will attend to maximise the benefit?

Perhaps this is much too mechanical way of looking at it, but I don’t want to go to a conference again and feel like it was a wasted day. Anyway rant over!

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