Considering a Tech Conference? Do’s, Don’ts, and Notes

I had the pleasure of attending my first tech conference as a young professional: All Things Open 2025. If any of you know of or are a developer, I’m guessing you can recall a time when the weight of networking and staying up-to-date on the newest technologies felt massive. There’s a reason after all – getting connected, diving deep, and learning from others is what innovation and development is all about! And that’s why I think it’s time you book your next tech conference.

So whether you’ve already gone, have one on the horizon, or are on the fence about it, this recap of my takeaways may serve you well. And because there was far too much goodness from All Things Open (ATO) to squeeze into one blog post, and I want to ensure you read what’s to come, I’ll give the short version: Do’s, Don’ts, and Notes…

Do prep your schedule.

Be sure to get connected and look at the conference agenda ahead of time, because there is often too much goodness to decide between. All Things Open had an app where I was able to favorite and create my own schedule by picking from the agenda’s events and speakers.

Don’t be afraid to flex your schedule the day of.

Once you have a mapping of how the conference days should go, still remain open to switching it up. Maybe you’re grabbing coffee with a new connection, diving into exciting content at one of the sponsor tables, or, like me, perhaps you’ll discover good keynotes that have later talks too! It felt meant to be when one of my favorite morning keynote speakers reminded us that he’ll be presenting at a session later that day, and it was actually a window I hadn’t found an inspiring talk topic for yet.

Note: The women’s restroom line is like a dream come true.

When I say my jaw dropped, I’m not kidding. As women in tech, we’re often in the minority. But a silly silver lining I discovered at All Things Open was that, for the first time at a large event, running to the restroom between things was a breeze! I’ve never seen such short waits for the women’s restroom during big group breaks. I guess you could say I got a snippet of heaven when I got to the lady’s room “line”.

Do write things down to look up later.

Whether it’s terms, unfamiliar acronyms, new tools, or historically prominent names, be sure to scribble it down as you go. The list may get long, but it’ll be the perfect side quest to follow up on after! It’s hard to write fast enough or dive into questions during full days of hefty content presentations anyways. And, if you’d like a test, my scrappy list from All Things Open can be found at the bottom of this post too.

Note: ‘Raise your hand AND say “I”‘.

This is just one example of all the enlightening info I had the honor of absorbing at ATO. During this conference, it was shared that we should ask people to raise their hand and say “I” when, for example, taking polls or interactive counts. It’s an important and inclusive tip that also conveniently raises engagement and energy. And I hope sharing it here will inspire others to consider similar shifts. Ex. “How many of you came to ATO last year?..”

Do, for the love of all things, move IN some before sitting. And,

…Don’t be the person at the end blocking the whole row

We’ve all had to awkwardly scooch past someone, maybe in a restaurant, airplane, or theater’s all-too-tight rows. So please, if at all possible, let’s avoid such situations at conferences. Leaving one seat between you and others, now that I totally get. But if the 10 middle seats are open and you’re comfortably able and planning to stay the full talk…

Do remember what it’s like if you’ve ever tabled an event.

Just go up to them! I get it’s intimidating, and I felt the same way. But they’re just people, likely ones that are excited and have interesting things to share with you. At the end of the day, tablers want something to do and odds are they’ll lead the convo if needed. So go up, say hi, get some merch, and you’ll probably leave with a new connection and topic insight!

Note: I didn’t realize how you become a speaker at these things.

A surprisingly impactful takeaway from my time at All Things Open, was realizing how speakers become speakers. For some reason I didn’t think that they’re just people like us. The main difference is that they went for it! The three varying and all-inspiring examples I gathered during my days at ATO are as follows:

• Speaker 1 had to take PTO because work wouldn’t honor the development of a conference. They started going annually, and simply applied after being inspired by others. They’ve spoken at dozens of conferences for years now.
• Speaker 2 has a typical (impressive) company job and is happy to step up for this side quest when the times come. They were one of my favorite speakers, so it seemed that the balance of being a standard engineer with the fun outlet of public speaking was perfect for them.
• Speaker 3 applied 5 years in a row and didn’t get the opportunity. But after consistent commitment as well as networking with the event heads, they were invited to be a keynote speaker this year!

Don’t use dark low contrast slides, presenters.

There’s not much to it; ensure your slide design will be readable. Oftentimes speakers don’t have control over the lighting or even the set-up of what they’re presenting on. So please just think about your slides’ contrast! It’s hard to take in content when the text is dark purple and the background is black. Don’t let the directly-overhead room lights get the best of ya.

Do keep coding.

Take in this grounding, wake-up call quote from Andrew Ng’s blog post. It was referenced by one of the ATO speakers, and is worth a read from you, too.

“Some people today are discouraging others from learning programming on the grounds AI will automate it. This advice will be seen as some of the worst career advice ever given.[]Statements discouraging people from learning to code are harmful![]As coding becomes easier, more people should code, not fewer![]As these tools continue to make coding easier, this is the best time yet to learn to code, to learn the language of software, and learn to make computers do exactly what you want them to do.”

-Andrew Ng

Note: “Tech can’t represent all people if it’s not created by all people.”

Read that again. A beautiful quote by a lovely speaker, Bree Hall, on the topic of AI bias and accountability.

And most importantly… Do have a company that is willing to invest in you.

And if you’re not lucky enough to experience that, don’t be afraid to invest in yourself! Who knows, maybe we’ll meet one another at next year’s conference.

My ATO List:

• Model collapse
• UN Open Source Principles
• “CNCF”
• Sbombs, security
• Bun
• Zig, language
• Ghosty
• Vercel
• SDLC
• Kafka
• LangGraph, agent framework
• RAG
• Redis, db company – LangCache (their LLM cache?)
• Token costs, using LLMs/calls
• Goose, mcp client
• Next play, cursor founded community
• Torc.community, can find a mentor/mentee
• Continue, cli (ai code assistant, like works w/claude)
• WeAreDevelopers
• Vellum, platform for AI TDD
• Lighthouse, AI eval of accessibility w/MCP server