You are responsible for your education
Many have said it before, and I’ll repeat it once more; as a developer you, yourself are the main responsible person for your own education. So not your employer, your mentors or anybody else. You are. This is one of the principles that is central to the software craftsmanship ideas.
So now we got that out of the way lets look at a particular way that I find very effective.
Software Conferences.
Software conferences offer the unique opportunity to first of all listen to some great people in the software industry talk about the topics that they are passionate about. Secondly you can have great discussion with the speakers, get more details about the topics that interested you.
I think that this might be the best way of introducing new ideas, you won’t know all the ins and outs, but you will know enough to determine whether or not to continue investigating them.
But
Lets go back to that it is your responsibility to educate yourself; so you want to go to one of these great conferences like for example; QCon, NDC or Øredev. These conferences are very focused on software craftsmanship and learning, but when I look at the costs of these conferences then I realize that it is almost not possible to be responsible for going to these events yourself. It is easy to spend 1.500 to 2.000 Euro on a three day conference including travel and hotel.
So these big conferences are really targeting companies, and they don’t really consider that there are many developers that cannot go because their employer is not willing to pay for their education.
Now I completely realize that having these conferences costs a lot of money, and also that if they would give some sort of discount for developers that pay their own ticket it would be misused by more then a few companies.
But honestly paying the 1.005 GBP for the QCon London event does hurt my wallet, I hope it is worth it 
Please note that this post has been tagged as a rant, but I hope it was an ok rant.
I am surprised that software conferences do not include an online offering. I would pay money (a significantly reduced amount compared to the ticket price, but still) to get a live (or close to) online broadcast of the conference talks, if combined with live meeting or similar online meeting software, and if it was organised and executed well.
So far I’ve been paying my way to any conference I want to go to, and the nearest user groups are a 2 hour drive away. Totally feel the pain here. My company has expressed some interest in helping with conference costs, if it is something relevant to their business. While it is a nice gesture, I’m really not trying to learn more ways to deal with ASP.NET Web Forms right now.
As soon as I started having to pay my own way, I started submitting talks to get the free admission. Don’t get irritated, get involved. You have a lot to offer, Mark. Believe me.
You can always come to pablo’s fiesta, http://fiesta.lostechies.com. It’s only $15
But seriously, if the cost of a conference is too much, do your own! It’s not as hard as you might think. There is more talent and knowledge in your area than you might think. And it benefits not only you but your community.
Luckily my company has been shelling out the cash needed for me to go to a few conferences. Went to MSDN Live and NDC last year, and I’m hoping I’ll make it to NDC this year as well.
Learned a lot, and got a tremendous amount of ideas to my problems.
If I wasn’t going on vacation to the States this year, I’d consider paying my way to Qcon as well. Perhaps I could visit some local usergroups while I’m in the States
I think we have discussed this before
I agree with you that it is your own responsibility. However, I think companies should help and encourage developers get better as well. It should be ingrained in the company culture. A company like this will have better more productive developers. I think a lot of companies don’t value education, and end up with developers that are still doing the same mistakes they did 10 years ago. Not valuing education is wasting money.
Working smarter means working faster. In software working smarter does not mean increasing productivity by a percent or two. We are talking about increasing productivity 10-fold.
In the end companies benefit from sending their developers on conferences. You should not pay for it yourself. There is a lot companies that will pay for your trip, so consider leaving the ones that don’t
Peace
We need more community driven conferences in Norway. I attended Smidig2009, which was a 2-day lightning talks open spaces conference on Agile last fall. The price was 1000NOK,- (and 500NOK,- for a nice dinner drinks, roughly ~250$ total), and it was one of the best conferences I attended last year.
While living in Australia in 2008 I had the pleasure of attending CodeCamp Oz and CodeCamp Nz (http://jonas.follesoe.no/InteractiveVideoUsingSilverlightCodeCampOz.aspx and http://jonas.follesoe.no/UnitTestingPresentationModelAndTheHTMLBridgeAtCodeCampNZ.aspx). Both conferences where free, and 100% community driven.
The one in Australia was brilliant. It was hosted in Wagga Wagga, half way between Melbourne and Sydney. Which meant people from both cities had to make the 6 hour drive up. But this was awesome as no-one actually lived in Wagga Wagga, so the the attendees hang out in the evenings at bars and stuff. Great fun!
We should try to get something similar organized in Norway.
@Paul Batum
Yes I agree broadcasting sessions live would be great, especially when you are not even on the same continent. There are many conferences that I would love to experience but are just to far away.
@David Starr
Hehe thanks, I am getting more and more involved, submitted 3 talks for NDC 2010 and active in the user group. I am just thinking that there are many more developer that should be going to these events but the high price means that they won’t be doing this them selfs.
@John Teague
I would definitely like to try to set something up with our local user group.
@BjartN
I completely agree with you here, it is long term value.
@Jonas Follesø
Next time I would love to attend Smidig, I heard many good things about it. Also we should discuss how to get something up and running. Tonight we spoke about it during a small geek beer and we are not alone in wanting to get something up and running. Lets talk some more about this shortly.
Mark,
Personally I tend to avoid the big expensive conferences unless I’m presenting. The speaker list and the topics are geared towards the companies who are most likely to pay for their staff to attend.
Instead I prefer to focus on smaller community driven conferences like BarCamps, XPDays or even FOSDEM. They’re smaller, open to new ideas and are much more likely to be interactive rather than a lecture.
online conferences is the best solution Less expensive and effictive way To attend