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Ask HN: For $5000, what conferences or online training would you attend/buy?

3 points by codingforprod ↗ HN
I am an ML/MLOps engineer and have $5000 to spend on any online trainings, conferences, workshops. This is an annual professional development budget. What do you suggest? Anything from statistics/ML to kubernetes to project management is fair game.

I recently attended reinvent for the 2nd time but I was unimpressed by the quality.

EDIT: the conference could be in person or online.

8 comments

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version_five
Does it have to be online? I'm in a similar field and I don't know how I would usefully spend even part of that on training. I'd rather have $5k worth of time off to pursue all the free learning options that are our there. To me, it's not really a field where paywalled information is the bottleneck.

If you can go to in person conferences, do that, for the networking.

Or depending on what kind of compute you have access to at work, just ask if you can have 5k of aws / gpu time to explore what interests you.

codingforprod
No it doesn’t need to be online! I meant in person conferences and/or online trainings. I have almost unlimited compute at work so that’s really not a problem. AWS reinvent’s ticket alone was $1800 and it was a sales conference. So I wanna know if there is anything that’s worth attending.
version_five
My opinion only: outside of very specific research niches, conferences are not worth going to for the talks or tutorials. AWS reinvent almost certainly is in this category, you can find all the content on YouTube.

The reason to go is for the networking. So ask yourself what conferences will have people you want to talk to at them. It could be on the tradeshow floor or in the poster session of an academic conference. And prioritize talking to people, and seeing a bit of the city. Go to talks if something looks interesting - just don't expect the official presentation content at any conference to be worth the price of admission.

codingforprod
That makes sense. I was hoping I could find an online course or workshop that’s worth the money. Unfortunately, it seems like the conferences are really not worth the money.
nullfield
O’Reilly’s online books/live trainings platform is quite, quite useful, for around a tenth of that budget. I’m not sure if it qualifies as “training” enough for you, but between access to a ton of books and video courses from competent people, along with live sessions… it’d seem to be?