13 Reasons Every Developer Should Attend a Conference This Year

Think of the last time that you got off a conference call or out of one of your regular meetings feeling recharged, inspired, and motivated. What about the last time that you took time out of your workday to really invest in yourself and learn something new? When was the last time that you encountered someone in a hallway at work and had a conversation that truly opened your mind?

If you’re anything like the normal software developer, or any IT professional for that matter, these things don’t happen very often at your place of work, whether that's your home office or your company's office. After all, who has time to talk about inspiring things during a regular meeting or to spend hours learning something that’s not directly related to a project that you are working on at the moment?

But time and time again, studies show that nearly half of professionals report feeling overwhelmed or burned out at work. We spend way too much time juggling projects and to-do lists. Most important, we don't take time to renew.

The key to being excellent at what you do

According to the author of The Way We’re Working Isn’t Working, if you truly want to be excellent at anything you must take renewal breaks and seek expert feedback. Attending a conference will help you do just that. That’s just two of the many reasons why you should attend a conference this year.

But don’t attend just any conference. Not to brag, but if you are a software developer, there’s no better place to be in June than in sunny Orlando, Florida, among 4,000 people with similar interests and experiences at IBM Innovate conference. With 430 technical sessions, hands-on workshops, inspiring keynotes, and a high-energy exhibit hall, Innovate is the ultimate event for software and systems innovators. Not to mention all of the fun activities and the beautiful weather at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Hotel.
We put together a cool list of the top 13 reasons you should attend IBM Innovate conference this year:

1. Renew and take a break
Nearly 75 percent of employees around the world feel disengaged at work every day. You must take time to get out of your regular work space and environment to refresh your mind, get new ideas and be inspired. Coming to Innovate will help you do just that, invest in yourself and grow professionally.

2. Make new connections
Network and connect with over 3,000 professionals and experts like yourself.

3. Hear from top developers and get expert feedback
Attend our new "Direct from the Jazz Developers" track. No fluff, no marketing, no hype, just the expertise of a world-class, globally distributed, development team. Learn what the experts already know. Get great tips and techniques, master cool features quickly, breeze through startup, wrestle your unwieldy source code to the ground and create reports that will get you promoted!

4. Learn from industry experts
Learn from dozens of industry experts, like agile thought leaders Mary Poppendieck, Scott Ambler, Alan Brown, Elizabeth Woodward, Scott Will, Bruce Douglass and more.

5. Experience live real-world scenarios
Let's hook up – your tools, our tools, their tools! This real-time interoperability showcase allows you to experience live scenarios between a huge variety of tools from Rational's own offerings to other IBM software, to other company's tools to open source, to open source.

6. Meet our developers
Hang with our developers at the Developer's Cafe to get the inside scoop on Rational products and learn about tools and techniques for building innovative software.   

7. Transform to agile in real-time
Check out the Agile Transformation Zone on the Exhibit floor to get personalized advice from our Agile experts to help your organization adopt Agile practices and successfully modify them for more complex environments.  Visit Coaches Corner to get real-time advice and answers to your questions about Agile.

8. Compete in Code Camp
University students ("Generation Next") will participate in a coding competition under the scenario of a virtual race car. Come see who will go head-to-head at the finish line against the winning team from the “Generation Now.”

9. Educate yourself on agile processes
Chose from over 50 sessions on a variety of Agile topics, including effective adoption, scaling Agile, avoiding agile pitfalls, mobile development with agile and much more.  Gain insights from other companies who are having success with Agile on their projects.

10. Influence the future of developer tools
Check out the Usability Zone and work with our designers and technical experts to influence the future of IBM's development tools!

11. Get started with agile
Interested in getting started with Agile? ScrumMaster® certification is a good place to start.

12. Learn about the future of testing
Visit the Green Hat booth and attend sessions to learn about IBM's new testing solutions.  Learn how you can become more agile in your testing with our new exciting solutions.

13. Share your experiences
Last but not least, you can share your experiences with peers. Discover how your peers are solving real-world business problems and creating new ways to implement solutions.

You shouldn’t attend Innovate if…

Maybe you’re nothing like what I just described. You simply love conference calls. You can’t wait to be in as many meetings as possible to get energized and motivated. You never feel overwhelmed, and you don’t even need breaks. Most important, you never, ever say any of these things in this video below. In that case, you probably shouldn’t attend Innovate.

Stuff Developers Say

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