In December of 2023, I wrote an article called The Importance of Attending Conferences detailing how important it is to attend conferences in person for your career growth. I’d like to continue with this idea and for this article, talk about how important it is to speak with the speakers and the attendees.
Last November, I spoke at the Build Stuff conference in Lithuania. One of the things that I noticed while I was attending was that the attendees were not interacting with the speakers much outside of their session. I even sent out a tweet encouraging attendees to come and ask me questions about code performance or interviewing. Sadly, no one did. Most of the people that I ended up speaking with were fellow speakers and organizers.
For as long as I have been speaking, I feel one of my duties at a conference is to be available to the attendees to help them with issues they are dealing with on their projects. Especially if that conference paid for me to travel halfway around the world to speak there.
I make sure that if I’m not speaking, preparing to speak, or resting, I make myself available to the attendees. I walk around the conference area. I seek out people to chat with at lunch and other events. I attend sessions where attendees can talk with me before or after the session.
I will say that every conference is different and some go out of their way to ensure there are networking events. But at these events, I mostly see attendees talking with other attendees that they know. While this is good, what is even more valuable is to seek out other attendees and speakers that they don’t know to get more opinions and information.
To illustrate this further, I will tell you what happened while I was teaching a workshop at a Code Camp in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania in the United States. I encouraged my workshop attendees to walk up to a table of people that they didn’t know at lunch and strike up a conversation. After I shut down my computer and walked up to the lunch area, guess what I saw? All my attendees were talking with each other! After lunch, I told them that they did exactly what I said not to do!
I have also learned speaking in many states in America and other countries, some of the hesitation for attendees to interact with the speakers or even each other is a regional or cultural thing. For example, speaking in India, I am inundated with attendees wanting to talk with me or take a selfie. So much so, that I must periodically escape to my hotel room to get away from it for a bit. After all, I am an introvert! But at other conferences, such as in Lithuania and Denmark, I experience the opposite.
Speak to the Speakers!
When you think about it, at every conference, many speakers add up to hundreds of years of experience so this is your opportunity to take advantage of that knowledge. This is your time to use that experience to help you with your projects and career.
For example, if you do have a specific issue, such as with Azure, then seek out one of the speakers who spoke on the subject. They might have the answer or know who does. In my case, you can ask me anything related to .NET, code quality, code performance, interviewing, and more!
One way to break the ice with a speaker that you might not know is to seek them out after they spoke and tell them how much you enjoyed their session. I can tell you that we never get enough of that kind of feedback! Also, send a Tweet about sessions you like too. I use this to tell me how well I did since at most conferences we don’t get any official feedback from the attendees via the conference. However, I have learned that most attendees do not Tweet about their experience at a conference, so please start! Speakers and the conference organizers would like you to!
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