Objective Bias

My last blog post was mainly about how valuable conferences can be for networking and socializing with other developers. I had promised myself to attend one of the "big two" conferences next year (CFUnited or CFObjective). Well, we all know what happened to CFUnited since my last blog post (wow – has it been that long?). In the aftermath of the "death" of CFUnited, many people in the community have pointed to the state of the economy and companies have had to cut back on their conference budgets. With airfare, hotel and registration fees, one can easily spend up to $2000 attending one of these conferences (as a freelancer who has to pay his own way, that has been one of the reasons I have yet to attend). Another aspect of this discussion has the rise of smaller, shorter, regional conferences, such as NCDevCon, D2W, BFusion/BFlex, and RIA Unleashed. These low-cost (sometimes free) conferences can be a great value because many of them also include hands-on training workshops in addition to the standard sessions.

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