I figure now is the perfect time create this list because I am experiencing some serious writers block plus I keep hearing about all of these great conferences and I am beginning to lose track of them all. By no means is this list comprehensive or all encompassing, it is simply a collection of those that are 1.) located in the United Sates 2.) the most relevant to my career and therefore those which I find to be the most interesting, and 3.) well enough established and encompassing enough to be well known across the country.
My hope is that one day I will get to attend most, if not all of these conferences. It’s doubtful but at least it’s a dream. So to get started it will probably be helpful to break these up into different categories just to make things easier to read and understand. Initially (as of this writing) there is not really any method to the madness, this is more of a brain dump of all the interesting conferences I hear about. Also, some of these have multiple conferences and categories so I will just group them into the main ones for readability.
Please, if you have a suggestion or idea to add to the list let me know and I will be sure to add it.
Conference | Location | Category | Date |
SCaLEX | Las Angeles, CA | Linux | February |
Schmoocon | Washington DC | Hacker/Security | February |
Cascadia | Seattle, WA | Sysadmin | March |
PyCon | Location varies | Programming | March |
Monitorama | Location varies | DevOps | March |
Chef Conf | Location varies | DevOps | April |
LOPSA-East | New Brunswick, NJ | Sysadmin | May |
EMCWorld | Las Vegas, NV | Vendor (EMC) | May |
Interop | Las Vegas, NV | Vendor | May |
Redhat Summit | Boston, MA | Linux | June |
HP Discover | Las Vegas, NV | Vendor (HP) | June |
Cisco Live! | Location varies | Vendor (Cisco) | June |
Blackhat | Las Vegas, NV | Hacker/Security | July |
DEF CON | Las Vegas, NV | Hacker/Security | July/August |
VMWorld | San Francisco, CA | Vendor (VMWare) | August |
DerbyCon | Louisvill, KY | Hacker/Security | September |
MEC | Location varies | Vendor (Microsoft) | September |
Puppetconf | San Francisco, CA | Sysadmin | September |
SkyDogCon | Nashville, TN | Hacker/Security | October |
Spiceworld | Austin, TX | Vendor (Spicworks) | October |
PhreakNIC | Nashville, TN | Hacker/Security | October/November |
LISA | Location varies | Sysadmin | November |
Toorcon | Location varies | Hacker/Security | Date varies |
SANS | Location varies | Sysadmin | Date varies |
B-Sides | Multiple locations | Hacker/Security | Multiple dates |
RSA | Multiple locations | Security | Multiple dates |
Usenix | Multiple locations | Sysadmin | Multiple dates |
TechEd | Multiple locations | Vendor/Sysadmin | Multiple dates |
Velocity | Multiple locations | Vendor/Sysadmin | Multiple dates |
I’m sure there will be more to come but this is all I could come up with for the time being. As stated, I will be revisiting this post in the future to add and update the list. I hope you find it useful, who knows maybe I will see some of you at these conferences.