I often get the question from fellow developers and business people: "Why should I or my developers attend a conference?". Here's my take as a seasoned developer with a strong focus on business.
1: It's by far the best way to explore new stuff
The frontend world has become a complex landscape because of growing expectations from consumers and stakeholders. What makes it worse is the sheer number of directions your developers could follow to solve a specific problem.
One solution for this is to attend conferences. It's a unique opportunity to meet other developers that face similar problems or they might have already come up with a solution of their own!
A while ago I was attending a conference where a guy spoke about Micro Frontends. When we started discussing it during the after drinks, other developers of similar companies joined us. Then we decided to start a 'task-force' where we discuss our approaches online specifically targeted towards our shared use-cases and that worked for us! It was essentially speeding up our work and saved us months of trial and erroring by ourselves and 50 other developers!
Imagine the cost saving here on human resources. Plus you get a lot of 'free' expertise from other developers and a chance to make them bond with your company!
2: Great opportunity to meet the experts
The speakers at a conference are there for a reason. They either solved something in a unique way, have new insights to share or they are sharing the latest features of the frameworks that they are contributors or creators of.
Let's say you are a Vue developer working with Nuxt.js. Then what's better than talking with the people that created Nuxt.js?! They are the experts, because they have created Nuxt.js with the intention to solve specific problems. They could help you and your company to tackle problems using that framework's best practices!
Beat that, online tutorials!
3: It's good fun!
I'm this guy that loves talking and discussing developer related stuff endlessly. Since conferences are mostly packed with like-minded people (fellow developers, software companies, designers, etc) it is a great way to talk with new people and share different perspectives on the same subjects.
Most conferences also have after-parties with drinks where it's simply about having a good time. This promotes the community feeling and allowes people to connect in a different setup besides the professional environment of a company.
4: It's impossible to learn if you don't know what you need to learn
The developers world is huge. There are so much patterns, architectures, concepts, soft-skills and languages and they all solve specific problems. It's easy to go onto Google and search for a concept that you are already aware of, but it's impossible to look for a concept from which you have no clue that it exists in the first place!
Now imagine you allow your developers to take coaching classes (which can literally cost a lot of money). Which class or subject should they cover?
Conferences and other people are the best place to stumble upon new concepts and give insights into what subjects your developers should be focussing on!
Why Frontend Love and VueJS Amsterdam?
At Frontend Love we strive to be the ultimate platform for experts, developers and companies to team up. The speakers and subjects are being chosen by our own developers and this has multiple reasons.
Some of our developers are very active contributors to communities and open source projects. I personally love to talk about subjects that matter for developers and am able to give technical feedback on the topics themselves. This improves the quality of the talks and the schedule as a whole. Creating the schedule is actually our side-job!
Also devs working on other companies means that we know what issues companies are dealing with and that's how we select the right experts for the stage! Its therefore guaranteed to be extremely valuable for your company and your developers to attend!
Our focus on developers sets us apart!
Frontend Love is really focussed towards frontend developers. This is what sets Frontend Love apart from other huge conferences, where speakers often times have nothing to do with development in general. Our speakers are either developers, advocates or tutors! Some other conferences are mostly purely focussed on other companies and simply show the latest and greatest. Not so much towards developers, even though they sell it as if it is a technical conference..
Vue.JS Amsterdam is even more focussed towards (obviously) Vue specific stuff and even so, there is so much to talk about so many topics to cover...
We still have tickets available for both Frontend Love (19th February 2020) and our Vue.JS Amsterdam (20/21th February 2020):
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