Caught a post in my Twitter feed called “Couch Con’ing O’Reilly Fluent Conference 2016”… David couldn’t go to Fluent – web development conference this year, so he listed the sessions he would have gone to and indicated why. It made me think of how I approach conferences. Most of the conferences I want to go to, I can’t go to – there’s not enough time and money loosely available for me to hit up everything I’d like. But I’ll often do what David’s done and survey the session list for a conference… my intent is to see what the general themes are, and see if there’s anything that comes up enough to either have me try to find some replay of that session or go research the topic on my own. Couple of hints on the approach for replaying sessions or otherwise getting access to information a speaker will present:
1) O’Reilly in particular tapes many of its conferences and makes the sessions available to its Safari subscribers. I’ve caught sessions from Strata, Cultivate, OSCON, and Fluent, all through paying one fee per year for unlimited video access. Even for conferences I attend, I can’t hit every session I want – this lets me go back and catch all the topics I manage to find time to fit in.
2) Some conferences (Google I/O, Oculus, Samsung Developer) are kind enough to set up YouTube channels, with videos per presentation.
3) Conference schedules list speakers. Speaker bios list blog pages and Twitter handles. Often speakers will be talking about their topic du jour on their site or Twitter stream… maybe even posting their slides or blog posts talking about their topic. Nothing like paying attention to a speaker’s material before they have to get in front of a crowd of a few hundred folks – helps them fine tune and you get better insights.
4) Some speakers are at conferences at least partly to gain visibility in the tech ecosystem to get their book at the top of your reading list. OK, maybe I can’t hear you in person, but I can skim your book. You, speaker, went out of your way to be approachable at a conference. I, potential book purchaser and person interested in topic, value that putting yourself out there and may buy the book which you’ve basically set up your talk around.

For the record, I’m findable online for MIL-OSS (few OZONE Widget Framework GOSS talks, and one Ignite style session on “It’s the Community, Stupid”) and O’Reilly OSCON (2014: “Arduino + Furby Broken Build Notification – Oh, You’ll Want to Fix it Quick!”). I’ll add to it this year with another OSCON talk: “FURBY: ‘Go’ away!”. So watch my blog and Twitter feed for insights into the new talk as I mutter my way through evenings of code and Furby mumblings.