Welcome to Bonus Episode #05 of the Nerd Journey Podcast [@NerdJourney]! We’re John White (@vJourneyman) and Nick Korte (@NetworkNerd_), two VMware Solution Engineers who are hoping to bring you the IT career advice that we wish we’d been given earlier in our careers. In today’s episode we briefly discuss our plans for VMworld 2019 in San Francisco, then focus on the more general case of attending IT conferences.
Original Recording Date: 08-11-2019
Topics – VMworld 2019 Plans and Attending IT Conferences
1:03 Attending VMworld 2019 in San Francisco

* John and Nick both first attended VMworld before becoming employees
* John and Nick both have short sessions. Come check them out!

* John’s – Save the IT Department: Add the Development Platform to Your Portfolio [CODE3333U]
* Nick’s – Pi in the Sky: Using Wavefront to Analyze Pi-Hole Data [VMTN5013U]

* We’ll have Nerd Journey Stickers!
* Tweet @ us for a chat or a meal!
* We’ll bring recording gear if you’re interested in recording a brief discussion about your VMworld show or career journey

5:17 Choosing the Right IT Conference to Attend

* Types of Conference

* Vendor Specific

* Sponsored and dominated by one vendor

* VMware VMworld
* Microsoft Ignite
* Oracle Openworld
* Kubecon
* Dockercon
* AWS Re:Invent
* Apple WWDC
* Google Next
* Salesforce
* etc

* Vendor tech sphere and adjacencies
conference, but now it’s a general security conference
* Vendor announcements

* Review Bonus Ep #1‘s discussion of career implications on paying attention to announcements

* Industry Specific

* Spiceworld
* BlackHat
* Human Resources
* Modern Arts
* Manufacturing
* John points out that RSA used to be a vendor show, but is now a general technology security industry show

* Topic / Thought Area Specific

* Leadership
* Monitorama
* DevOps Days

* 9:42 Things to consider when making a decision

* What interests you?

* Specific technology area

* Branching out into coding, containers, cloud, etc

* Specific vendor’s brand / product

* Who do you love?
* Cross-show exposure – vendors showcase at each other’s show –

* Industry exposure

* Trends and hot topics

* 12:38 What are the reasons to attend?

*
Nerd vacation

*
Party

*
Professional Networking

* Industry peers
* Job seeking
* Vendor face time
* Friends and associates who you only get to see at conferences

* Shout out to Al Rasheed‘s list of people to meet!

*
Learn new skills / exposure to a new area or technology

*
Become more specialized

*
Become more generalized

*
Reward for team members if you have influence over that

*
Past,