Ask HN: Are you going to meetups/conferences?

12 points by carimura 5mo ago ↗ HN

For those that used to attend in-person technical events before 2020, are you going again?

It feels to me like the US is slower to return to in-person events than other parts of the world.

7 comments

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I've tried several times and never understood what i was doing there...

Not unless I'm forced to. Even before the pandemic, it was really hard to justify the time and expense in attending these things.

jarofgreen 5mo ago ↗

Almost never now, and I used to go to lots. In fact I've launched https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ to try to promote virtual tech events that include community participation instead.

mrdatawolf 5mo ago ↗

Our local Linux group meets every month. It has become far more general tech focused but still there is always something new that gets demoed. https://humlug.com

techtalksweekly 5mo ago ↗

Definitely less than before 2020, but in the meanwhile, I built Tech Talks Weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/ where I send out all the recently published conference and meetup talks every week.

tokkyokky 5mo ago ↗

Yes, in Japan the trend seems to have shifted back toward in-person events. Most meetups and conferences I see now are offline rather than online, definitely more than a year or two ago.

mfalcon 5mo ago ↗

In my opinion, conferences are mostly high noise low signal. My boss went to an "AI conference" last month and all the learnings he shared were things I was advocating already:

- use claude code

- evals are critical

- don't use AI everywhere

I think the conferences are more "work vacations" than work. Maybe they're useful if you think about them this way.