TechDays? No Thanks

12 commentsWritten on March 10th, 2009 by
Categories: Opinions

Ok, so people are asking me why i'm not going to the TechDays event. The answer to that question is very simple: if i want questionable content with bad marketing, i'd just turn on the TV :p

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 10th, 2009 at 21:55 and is filed under Opinions. You can subscribe to any comments to this entry via RSS 2.0. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  • http://elegantcode.com Jan Van Ryswyck

    Sweet. I twittered about that today as well :-) . Conclusion: meh.

  • http://www.filip.duyck.org efdee

    Couldn’t possibly agree more.

  • http://www.goeleven.com Yves Goeleven

    Davy,

    I think this post is a bit short sighted, I just returned from techdays and have seen sessions on

    Architectural patterns (not product related, just an explanation of how different business models map to different implementations)
    Lean Software Development and how to implement it on TFS
    Code contracts and parameterized unittesting with pex
    WCF tips and tricks (really good content, not just the stupid things)
    Hyper-V tips and tricks (most tips targetted at devs, eventhough it was an itpro session)

    I’m quite happy I attended, but you have to take some time to choose the ‘decent’ sessions…

    Kind regards,
    Yves

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    Yves,

    of the hours you spent there, how many did you think were truly valuable? Do you think you could have learned as much if you had set out to get that information on your own?

  • http://www.goeleven.com Yves Goeleven

    Davy,

    I have explicitly taken the time to go to those sessions that I have not yet invested a lot of my own time in, I never go to sessions in which i think I’m allready well informed. In that respect I manage to pick up a lot of info in a short time…

    and the other part of the day is spent on another important aspect of such events: networking…, you shouldn’t be sitting in sessions all the time…

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    Yves,

    i guess it really depends… most of my coworkers went (i was the only one to decline), and amongst them, they pretty much covered most sessions that were there. I’ve heard of 3 sessions that i _might_ have found interesting.

    As for the networking… i consider that (in general) to be a tremendous waste of time. If i ever need networking to get ahead, i’d much rather go do something outside of software development to be honest. There are far better ways to learn from others than networking.

  • http://www.goeleven.com Yves Goeleven

    Davy,

    Most people make the mistake of not looking at all the sessions, especially the IT pro sessions are often missed. Another mistake people often make is to go to the big rooms, but usually the sessions held there are to low in technical content to be interesting, they are more marketing talks, the draggy droppy happy shiny sessions… but still a lot of the other sessions are really good.

    And for the networking stuff… I think you should consider it more, especially if you are a consultant it gets you far better positions at companies if you allready know other consultants at those companies, consultancy is a people business after all.

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    don’t get me started on consultancy :p

  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/ Tom Mertens

    Davy,

    As the organizer of the TechDays in Belgium, I obviously disagree with your point of view that TechDays brings “questionable content with bad marketing”. ;-)

    The content team (Katrien De Graeve, Hans Verbeeck and Arlindo Alves) does a lot of effort to find the best speakers and subject matter experts each year. They also have strict rules to plan good technical content, without marketing messaging. That’s also the reason that not the marketing but the technical team is responsible for the session selection.

    Now, I’m also very interested in learning what content exactly would make you want to attend TechDays. Would you mind sharing that with us (via your blog or via e-mail)?
    I do agree that the TechDays conference agenda is not suitable for every single developer out there. If you wouldn’t learn enough to compensate being 3 days out of the office, I think it was good choice to skip TechDays.

  • http://davybrion.com Davy Brion

    @Tom

    i’ll post a write-up of what would make me want to visit these kinds of events tonight ;)

  • http://msdn.microsoft.com/nl-be/ Tom Mertens

    Great… Looking forward for it.

  • Pingback: The Inquisitive Coder - Davy Brion’s Blog » Blog Archive » What I’d Like To See At Microsoft’s Technical Events

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