You are responsible for your education

January 14th, 2010

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.

Mark Nijhof

  • http://paulbatum.com Paul Batum

    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.

  • http://cysemic.com Chris Allen

    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.

  • http://elegantcode.com David Starr

    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.

  • http://johnteague.lostechies.com John Teague

    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.

  • Henning Anderssen

    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 ;)

  • http://bjarte.com BjartN

    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

  • http://jonas.follesoe.no Jonas Follesø

    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.

  • http://elegantcode.com/about/mark.nijhof/ Mark Nijhof

    @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.

  • http://http//blog.oshineye.com Ade

    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.

  • http://handytracker.eu Handy

    online conferences is the best solution Less expensive and effictive way To attend

  • http://elegantcode.com/about/mark.nijhof/ Mark Nijhof

    @Ade
    This year will be my first QCon attendance, but what I have seen online I didn’t find them to be lecturing, also last year at NDC I felt the same way. But I would agree that I find the time after the presentations and in the evenings the most interesting parts of going to conferences as then I get to talk to a huge amount of interesting people. This is the same for when we invite someone to speak at our local user group. I assume that the smaller conferences give the same experience. Btw I hope to attend the Software Craftsmanship conference in the UK this year as well.

    @Handy
    You miss a whole lot of interaction, this is the most valuable part of a conference for me.

  • http://www.pchenry.com PHenry

    Great post! I’ve been on the other side of this issue and blamed the company I worked for, for not helping train/educate me. That was a very rough experience and I vowed NEVER to be lacking in training ever again! “So having got that out of the way,” :> I have a couple of cost effective means to help out people like us.

    Free (and usually local) Code Camps. The whole premise of Code Camps is they are free to all, and you can usually get some great local presence at these things. No, you’re not getting TOP notch, Tony Robbins, Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer presentations, but you will hear from passionate, enthusiastic local developers!

    Technical community groups (like the ODNC in Ottawa, ON, CA) is a great model. They also sometimes have study groups to help people even further their training with helping them achieve there MCTS (or higher) certifications. And those are usually VERY cost effective too!

    Another way is to start your own blog! Yup, it might not be as popular as this blog you’re reading now (you’re here after all right? :>), but the act of writting up something FORCES you to learn more about it. It’s an amazing trick to get you to learn more about a topic!

    Other ways are keeping on top of RSS Feeds. New to RSS, start checking it out NOW! Jason Haley’s Interesting Finds is a FANTASTIC place to start IMHO. He scours the web looking for interesting articles/blogs. This gives you a fantastic leg up on cherry picking the best sites to learn from.

    PHEW! That’s a lot I think. Good luck to you, I need to get back to my own learning! Kudos on this post!

  • http://nexeo.fr/nexdotnet/2010/01/22/nexhebdo-02/ Nex’Hebdo 02 | Nexdotnet’s Blog

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