I have been programming for a long time, a very very long time. Most of my programming career has been as a self-employed coder which puts a damper on the budget and put conferences far out of my reach for many years.

During my FoxPro days I took advantage of the FoxPro community (which has helped to shape today's .NET community) and attended lots of user group meetings in NYC where I lived at the time, and then in Westchester County when I moved north to Duchess County, New York.

The first time I ever shelled out my own cash for training was to attend a small 4-day workshop with Deborah Kurata in, maybe..., 1995 or 1996? It was just as VB6 was about to be released. Not only did I pay for the class, but the airfare and the hotel. This was an enormous deal for me - to go and to spend my precious money - and was worth every penny Up until then, I had been a completely self-taught developer for nearly 10 years.

The first conference I ever attended was DevConnections, Spring 2003 (after nearly 20 years of programming!) and the only reason I was there was because INETA brought me down for a big user group leader meeting. My user group and INETA were both about 1 year old and I still shook like a leaf when standing in front of my own user group just to tell them who the speaker was and what was coming up next month. I think I may have given my first presentation to the group by then.

Since then, things have changed quite a lot and I speak at about 8-10 conferences a year in the U.S., in Canada and further abroad.

One thing that I'm always curious about is how people are getting themselves to conferences. Who's paying for it? Are they self-employed? Work for a huge company? Do they get to go to conferences frequently? What conferences give them the best ROI?

I've been to small conferences (DevTeach, DevReach, DevSummit), large conferences (DevConnections, VSLive) and humongous conferences (TechEd, PDC) and find that they all offer a lot of value even if that value is calculated differently. The small conferences like DevTeach (which is coming up in a few weeks in Toronto and you can STILL register!) are really intimate. They draw the same speakers (just not as many) as the huge Microsoft conferences but because they are small conferences, everyone has a better chance of connecting. And they still offer a huge variety of content. Again, using DevTeach as an example, there's a great variety of tracks, from SQL to Agile to .NET with over 135 sessions as well as lots of pre and post conference workshops. The huge conferences are quite different with attendance in the 10,000 range, and an overwhelming number of sessions, cabana sessions, BOF and other learning opportunities all happening at the same time. It can definitely be overwhelming - for a speaker or an attendee. A conference like DevConnections might hit a sweet spot for many where you retain some of the intimacy yet have a huge variety of learning opportunities.

I don't have a favorite between the small, big and huge types of conferences, because they each give me something different and I'm fortunate to be able to get to so many, though I definitely have to work very hard in order to do so.

A few years ago Paul Litwin, who is the conference chair for ASPConnections teased me in a blog post saying that there was a time when I was an attendee that wanted to be a speaker (actually that's not really true since I had never really considered it as any type of goal, it just kind of happened...) and now I was a speaker who wanted to be an attendee . The second part is not totally wrong though. I miss being able to just be there, attend sessions, talk to people, absorb as much as I can. But when I'm speaking, it's not so easy to do since you want to spend as much time as you can making sure your talk is as good as it can be!