Where do you get your “In Person” fix?

imageMy team is in the midst of our planning cycle right now and a question came up that has me scratching my head. “What conferences or face to face activities do technical professionals in Canada attend in order to get training and keep up to date on what’s out there?” Times have changed – there used to be a lot of conferences and activities years ago – but what about now? Oh – I am also talking about ones NOT PUT ON BY MICROSOFT.  I’m trying to think outside of the box here. Drop me an email (rick.claus@microsoft.com), tweet me a reply (@ricksterCDN) or comment below if you please!

I’ve been hypothesizing over the last couple of weeks as I’ve been heading out to the community activities on the Virtualization Reality tour and talking with the folks afterwards over pints.  Developers / entrepreneurs / start-ups have the {fill-in-your-name}camp activities (DemoCamp, CloudCamp, CodeCamp etc). When I used to work for various consulting companies – we had internal lunch and learn and team knowledge building activities on a regular basis.  But what do “The Infrastructure Types” attend? 

There has to be more out there.

This is part of a larger conversation that I’ve been having with myself (ok – and others too, I don’t just talk to myself). You’ve heard me talk about investing in yourself and your skills – external training / info sessions / partner events are one avenue to stretch that training budget.  It still takes a withdrawal on your personal time budget.  Going out and participating in community driven technology meetups / user groups / professional associations also take a tax on your personal time, but it’s a necessary evil.

Do you take the time to make this type of investment? If so – where do you go? I ask once again: “What conferences or face to face activities do technical professionals in Canada attend in order to get training and keep up to date on what’s out there?” Drop me an email (rick.claus@microsoft.com), tweet me a reply (@RicksterCDN) or comment below if you please!

I’ll write up a summary of all the responses from across Canada for all to see.

Note: I didn’t call out TechDays on purpose. We will be sharing our plans for TechDays this year in the coming weeks.