Geek Breakfast at Devcon...

Surprisingly we had some folks turn up at the Devcon Geek Breakfast this morning, every seat at Starbucks was full... (actually, there weren't any seats, so we ended up just sitting on the floor)... Conversations covered everything from weather in San Diego, to application development in C# using the .NET Compact Framework, Google and how search results are perhaps not as good as they were a couple of years ago, hardware etc...

Even though there were only a handful of folks that turned out it was a really interesting experience... I'm definately going to have to do this again...

So this has me thinking about developers conferences in general...

Why do you go (or not go) to a developer conference, is it good to meet with other developers and chat about your experiences, or are you there to soak up information from the technical sessions and hands on labs...

If a conference was available as a "Virtual Conference", in a purely online format would this be better for you in terms of travel and hotels, time away from work etc... ? - if you could see a presentation given "live" and interract with the presenter, ask questions and chat with other attendees would this give you everything you need from a conference (apart from a few days away from home/office in a cool place like San Diego) ?

- Mike