[Offtopic] Developer conferences and/or training for 2012

[Leonard]

I work for a corporation which means that we generally need to finalise training budgets for 2012 early in the year (in my case by the end of March). I'd like to be able to suggest that my team get budget approval to attend primarily web-focused conferences or workshops during the year. While it might be tempting to say: "I'd like to attend 3 conferences this year with ticket prices ranging from 500 - 1000" I actually need to be able to point at specific events I'd like to attend.

I have two main problems though:

1. I don't know what conferences are on.

2. I don't know how much (even approximately) they cost.

Currently my approach is to see what was on last year and guess that there will be similar events being held this year. For instance Web Directions have already announced Melbourne for May and Sydney for October and I can assume that the ticket prices will be about the same.

Does anyone have any better ideas on how to get good technical training for me (and my team)? I'd love to encourage my team to learn modern programming practices and the time spent together at these sort of events is also beneficial from a team building perspective. If anyone has a simple page that says what's on, where and how much that would be a huge help too. If anyone on the list organises private workshops I'd be interested to hear about them. I could more easily sell an event focused on more generic topics like UI/UX, Data analysis or security rather than specific topics like Ruby on Rails (as my team mostly isn't ruby focused). Obviously if anyone has any better advice on forums to post this in then I'm happy to learn that too.

As a general comment to people organising conferences or workshops. If most corporations are like mine then getting pricing and dates out early in the year means we can nail down budget approval. If the event is announced even as late as June it can be a real hassle juggling budget around to get approval.

Regards,

Leonard

[Ben Schwarz]

Hi Leonard, 

Back in November last year I started something called "The Intro" (http://theint.ro), with which we ran a few focused workshops in Melbourne.

We've got some plans to get started for 2012 for public workshops in Melbourne and Sydney, and are also doing private workshops for groups of 5 or more. 

Otherwise, I know Jason Crane and Ben Webster ran a "Lean UX" workshop (http://leanux.com.au/) today, and they're excellent fellows, so I'd vouch for a repeat of that too. 

And finally, attending some meetups will give you a fair idea of local upcoming conferences. 

Cheers, 

Ben

[Daryl Manning]

From a management perspective, having gone through the same sort of things a few times and knowing places giving conferences aren't going to change, one thing you should attempt to push for is having a standard percentage set aside for training for each staff member. 

For example, I often pushed at places that didn't have it to set aside 5-10% of each dev;s salary as a professional development budget over and above their other social charges to the org. Figuring that out t the  beginning of the year to have budget room for those sorts of things makes that a lot less of an issue. Also, it acts as a recruitment and retention incentive for corps who generally have to compete (at least in the ruby world) with cooler more fun sounding startups with pool tables, nerf guns and beer fridges. 

But definitely a good management ju-jitsu move if you're doing that sort of forward planning. I'd also suggest a sit down with staff and figure out where they want to go skills-wise so they can use the budget room you get from that can be applied (with approval) on agreed skills improvement. Also, make sure you ask that budget can be rolled over in case workloads or availability/opportunity for conferences just doesn't pan out.

The only problem comes when you have conferences which are way out of whack cost-wise compared to the set budget (or if salaries are low, as they are in the charity sector.). 

Just an idea. Done that at a few larger, more bureaucratic places and after you've gotten over the initial bunfight over what the percentage for training or set budget room number is, it makes things a lot smoother. YMMV depending on where you are, how budgeting is handled internally and the attitude to training in your org.

ciao!

Daryl.

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[Leonard]

Thanks Ben,

Stuff like The Intro and Lean UX are the sort of things I'd like myself and my team attend, my issue is more of a company policy one. If you guys at The Intro are able to get pricing and dates out for any Sydney sessions before the end of March then I'd definitely be able to push to attend with some of my team. My issue isn't about not knowing what's on. I go to RORO every month so I generally know that a conference or event is being held, my problem is that I need to know before the end of this month so I can get work to pay for it.

In fairness I'm generally willing to pay for good workshops out of my own pocket (it's how I go to Railscamp), but we're pushing for my team to do more training than we currently do (nearly zero) and I'd rather we do good stuff that's actually useful rather than attending "Effective Time Management" or "Advanced Office Skills" courses that are offered via internally.

[Adam Boas]

Hi Leonard,

In terms of conferences YOW would probably be the pre-eminent developer conference, prices and details can be found here:

http://www.yowconference.com.au/

I have heard talk recently of someone putting together an Australian Ruby conf. Perhaps they will post details here on whether that is likely to get up this year and if so when/how much.

If your team is using agile then the Agile Australis conference on in May, pricing and details here:

http://www.agileaustralia.com.au/

Cheers,

Adam Boas

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[Mark Wotton]

testing the waters  - I've been chatting to OJ Reeves about possibly organising for Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ to do some training in Sydney. I know it's a bit niche for rubyists, but would anyone be interested nonetheless?

http://zguide.zeromq.org/ for more info - some of the best written and most entertaining tech documentation I've ever read, as well as some of the clearest C.

mark

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[Andy Shen]

On 12 March 2012 16:58, Mark Wotton <mwo...@gmail.com> wrote:
> testing the waters  - I've been chatting to OJ Reeves about possibly
> organising for Pieter Hintjens of ZeroMQ to do some training in Sydney. I
> know it's a bit niche for rubyists, but would anyone be interested
> nonetheless?

Yes

[Tim McGilchrist]

Count me in for the ZeroMQ training too.

-----------------------------------------------------

Tim McGilchrist

@lambda_foo

http://github.com/tmcgilchrist