IT Conference List

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.

Josh Reichardt

Josh is the creator of this blog, a system administrator and a contributor to other technology communities such as /r/sysadmin and Ops School. You can also find him on Twitter and Facebook.