Ask HN: What U.S. tech/developer conferences have you enjoyed?

3 points by jawns ↗ HN
My employer has generously increased our professional-development budget, opening up some new possibilities for attending tech/developer conferences.

I'd love to hear about some "diamond in the rough" conferences you've enjoyed. I've heard enough already about the big ones, which are mostly still out of my price range. Are there any smaller (and less expensive) conferences that are enriching?

I'm particularly interested in those that deal with web development, JS, Python, and data science, but feel free to comment about any tech-related conference.

4 comments

[ 0.22 ms ] story [ 18.5 ms ] thread
(Disclaimer: I don't know how good any of these are)

* PyCon

* Cloud Slam

* Strata

* O'Reilly Fluent Conference

* JSConf

  * NCDevCon (http://ncdevcon.com)
  * cfObjective (http://www.cfobjective.com/)
Both these started out as small ColdFusion (it's not dead) conferences but have grown into great general web development conferences.
HTML5 Conf - reason:

- cost is extremely fair < $99 for 2 days if got in on early bird.

- famo.us intro - mind blown https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxBxsLl9ViE

- react.js - very nice talk by Pete Hunt - video not recorded, but here's his past talks on it https://www.google.com/search?q=pete+hunt+react+video

- continuous delivery - learned how to give a great speech, aside from the topic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OXk3aUoZ7AQ

May's session just opened for tickets, although I'm probably going to pass it this time. Will probably attend Fall's session though.

strangeloop is the other one I would like to attend one day, but will need to save up money for it since it's slightly more expensive and requires a flight for me.

CHI and TEI is another ones I like to attend, but really need to save lots of money for.