Never attended a conference in the past so this was a truly great experience. I listen to all these geeky podcasts and conferences are mentioned in all of them so I was truly excited for this one. I am grateful with my company leadership because my leadership thought it was a good idea for me to attend so I happily did.
I have impressions from different angles.
The Organization
The conference was held at The Venetian hotel, in Las Vegas. I had already visited the hotel as tourist so I know it was pretty already. I had no idea of how huge it was. I needed a map to attend the talks. It amazed me how well organized it was for the number of people that attended (+10K per the news). The number of simultaneous talks was unbelievable. I could not decide which one to attend. I always ended up adding 4-5 to my agenda and deciding at the last minute.
The Talks
I feel this is the part that let me down a little. There were some good ones, bad ones and meh ones. I wish there were more technical talks.
At several points in the conferences, I got the impression that (some of) the talks had commercial purposes, trying to sell me on a product or platform, rather than the actual focus on the talk.
My favorite talk was about how Graph databases were used in a Banking Lending process. I just gave me a lot to think about.
The Event
Complementing my previous notes, I feel the event has a very clear target: CIOs, CTOs, SVPs, etc. Many of the talks had this business focus. Not that is bad at all. I just wish I had more options on the pure technical side. But that’s just because I’m a nerd.
AI companies such as Anthropic or Cursor were not present. I don’t know why. OpenAI was barely there. Lots of product companies.
Don’t look at my badge
Maybe because of the commercial tint of the event, I felt too many times that people would read my title on my badge before deciding if they wanted to talk to me. This is the only part that I kind of disliked from the event. I felt like (some) people would only talk to me if they had the impression that I was a decision maker to buy their product.
Overall feedback
I loved the experience. I’m grateful for having the chance I had to attend. I would attend a zillion times if I’m invited. I would not pay for it with my own money, though. It is very expensive for a (mostly) networking event.