On that note, here are a few of the conferences I’d like to attend. I expect I’ll be able to make it to about 70% of them. If you’re going to any of these, message me on Twitter @Adron (or leave a comment below) and we’ll have a coffee, beer, or beverage of your choice and chit chat about cloud computing, utility or grid bits, software development, node.js, testing, or what have you.  Cheers!

UX Related Conferences

Even though UX is by no means my specialty or something I generally am hired to work on, I personally consider UX to be one of the most important aspects of software development that exists. UX is the difference between “insanely great” applications and “shit” (I’m quoting Steve Jobs here, so excuse the harsh language, but it is true). With this serious focus on UX I find it extremely helpful to attend UX related conferences, talk to UI/UX pros, and generally be involved as often as possible in effective and great ways to build experiences for users around systems.

• SXSW in Austin, Texas: I’d love to attend this conference, it is however unlikely. Matter of fact, it is probably one of the only conferences I’d travel to Texas for. One of these days, I hope to attend.
• IA Summit in New Orleans, Louisiana: There are two primary reasons this event is on my list. 1, it’s in New Orleans and I always love to go visit my haunts from when I lived in the area and 2, the content looks pretty good & some solid people are attending.  Conversations and after conference events should be extremely enlightening.
• An Event Apart in Seattle, Washington: Again, a great conference series and it’s also in a great location. Seattle (which I happen to live here right now too) is a great place for conferences, a great place to think, and a great place for a convergence of user experience thought leaders.
• UX Week in San Francisco, California: San Francisco is another awesome city for these types of events (not distracting and annoying like Las Vegas). There will be some great collaboration and networking with great content. I’ll be putting forth an effort to attend this event.
• WebVisions in Portland, Oregon:  It’s in Portland, Oregon. Nuff said. Well ok, I’ll add a little more. WebVisions often has some of the best content around. I’ve never attended one of the conferences officially but have interacted with and been in town when the conference takes place in Portland. The beauty of Portland is that the events easily spill over into the most walkable, drink friendly, foodie heaven, easy to talk in environment, and one of the most technologically advanced and versed populations in the United States – thus providing WebVisions a GREAT reputation in my opinion.
• Siggraph in Los Angeles, California: This event really opens the mind up to some amazing new interactive experiences with technology.

Dev Related Conferences

Ok. I’m a software developer, no real need to define why I’m going to these.  😉

• Agile Open Northwest in Seattle, Washington: This is a great open spaces conference about agile ideals, practices, and approaches. It’s a great conference to get together with advocates and practitioners of agile/lean/XP or whatever and discuss what works, doesn’t, and what might work. Stepping into the future of being a better, faster, higher quality, happier and more bad ass team!
• WhereConference in San Francisco, California:  This event has multiple wins.
  • It’s in San Francisco, which is generally always cool.
  • It’s an O’Reilly Conference, which are generally always awesome.
  • Mobile + Geographic Location Finding is one of the most interesting and coolest realms of technology these days.
  • There are some spectacularly cool people attending that I’d love to spend some face to face time with and discuss where they’re headed, where they see location going, and generally have a drink or three and having a great time.
• OSCON in Portland, Oregon: This event is one of the, if not the best Open Source Software Conference in existence!  Again, anything in Portland makes it pretty easy to attend, and the environment in that city just adds all that much more to the conference!

Cloud / Utility / Big Data Computing Conferences

I’m a big advocate of geographically dispersed, grid compute, utility computing, platform infrastructure or software as a service, on autoscaling, scalable, and big data wielding, high query hadooping systems, AKA Cloud Computing. I see it as the future of high quality, fast paced, massively scaled, intelligent systems and development of these systems. Maybe I’ve drank the kool-aid, either way I’m hedging my bets with the cloud computing realm and not on legacy & traditional hosting and methods associated with that. Thus, I’m going to as many of these conferences too!

• Cloud Connect in Santa Clara, California: I’ve no idea how this conference is, nor if it will be good, but I’m signed up already. Anyone I know going? Anyone I don’t know but should? Ping me.
• Strata in Santa Clara, California: Again, never been to Santa Clara nor a conference here. I’ve heard good things about Strata so am working to attend. There is some really good content and more than a few people I’d like to catch up with.