Confoo 2023

This year I decided I would risk going out of my basement and actually meet people. I always like going to conferences, but with COVID around, the choices were quite limited. I think a lot of people decided 2023 would be the year COVID would not decide anymore whether if we should go out. Only time will tell if it's the right decision or not. I do not advocate being reckless, but like anyone else, it feels good to be outside.

So, first big conference of the year, not very far away (I live 1 hour away from anything anyway), Confoo felt like the right choice. I always heard bad and good stuff from Confoo.

Let's start with the bad stuff, no conferences RFP about Drupal/Wordpress (and maybe django?) ever make past the selection stage. That's kind of a bummer for me, that's the 3 frameworks I like/want to learn/use the most.

One of the good thing about Confoo though, is being framework agnostic, helps create very diverse tracks about everything (see the schedule for example). It doesn't have to be about code only, it can also be about management.

Having so many tracks at the same time though, always made it hard to choose exactly where to go. It's also quite depressing when the speaker doesn't even show up at his own talk (I'm talking about Jeremy Molla, Secure your apps with keycloak). You wait 5 minutes into the session before giving up and at this point it's too late to join any other ongoing session.

Finding the location was not obvious to me, but once you found it, it's a great place to be learning for 3-5 days.

All the sessions/keynotes from Laura Bell Main - SafeStack were spectacular. There was a lot of good talks as well, but it would be too long to list them all. I also don't want to shit on the less-than-spectacular sessions I attended. It's a lot easier to be in the attendance than being on stage.

So it was fun to meet people again. Feel the energy, learn new stuff, get a better understanding of stuff that was understood but not mastered. The price of the conference is a bit high compared to other conferences, but I still think it was worth it. I'll most likely be there next year as well 😄.