Simon Willison’s Weblog

What are good 2012 Technology Conferences in US for Programmers?

My answer to What are good 2012 Technology Conferences in US for Programmers? on Quora

It would help if you were more specific about the kind of programmer you are—there’s a big difference between C++ game developer conferences, Ruby on Rails events, Agile methodology conventions etc. Each developer ecosystem has its own flagship events (for Microsoft developers it’s the BUILD conference, which hasn’t been announced for 2012 yet—for iPhone/Mac developers it’s Apple’s WWDC, Oracle have Oracle OpenWorld, the Rails community has RailsConf, for Django people it’s DjangoCon US and EU, etc).

Our site Lanyrd is an attempt to catalog all of the conferences and events happening around the world. If you sign in with Twitter we’ll show you events your Twitter contacts are attending or speaking at, but you can also browse the site by topic. Here are a few pages that you may find relevant, depending on the kind of programming you do:

• Mobile: http://lanyrd.com/topics/mobile/
• HTML5: http://lanyrd.com/topics/html5-1/
• Agile: http://lanyrd.com/topics/agile/
• Open Source: http://lanyrd.com/topics/open-so...
• Java: http://lanyrd.com/topics/java/
• Ruby: http://lanyrd.com/topics/ruby/
• PHP: http://lanyrd.com/topics/php/
• Python: http://lanyrd.com/topics/python/
• Web Development: http://lanyrd.com/topics/web-dev...

I hope that’s useful. Let me know if there are any more specific categories of events you’d like tips on.