Today's post is my first of the "Friday Opinion" posts I talked about yesterday  where each of the guest bloggers discusses their opinion on a common topic.

Todays Topic: Top 3 Reasons I attend Tech Ed.

So here are mine:

            1. Networking

The IT community makes use of technology where possible and so the community of people you may communicate with daily or weekly are not people you *really* talk to a lot of the time. It’s a virtual community where people swap information via email, instant messenger, and other collaborative technologies. Quite often, you can be communicating with people for months without ever meeting them, so a large gathering such as TechEd where people from all over Australia congregate, is a fantastic opportunity to meet the people you may communicate with every day, swap information, ideas, and grow your personal network of colleagues and friends. In an ever more disconnected world, these opportunities are rare and to be treasured. This also includes meeting the various presenters and speakers at TechEd. Its not often you get to speak one on one to a lot of these people so I like to make use of it when I can.

            2. The presentations and information sessions

This may seem an obvious choice but its not to be overlooked. It’s the little nuggets of information, tips, tricks, and other unseen pieces of information that you can't get by searching the web and reading the provided information. Searching the web for something specific can often be a long process as its easy to get distracted along the way. Quite often I have left a session with a small piece of information that would otherwise take me days of investigation, and much trial and error by utilising the available information currently available. This kind of value is of extremely high value to me.

               3. The Party

In line with the point on networking above, getting a whole bunch of like minded geeks, nerds, boffins and tech heads (Tech Ed's..?) together for a big party bash is great fun and each year its usually a pretty big do. Can't wait to see whats on this year.

So that’s my top 3. Whats yours?