Learning Opportunities

There are a lot of free and relativity inexpensive options to learn about software development around the Washington, DC area.

• CMAP - Their main meeting is on the first Tuesday of each month in Columbia, MD
• .Net DC User Group - Meets on the third Tuesday of the month in Friendship Heights, MD
• Capital Area .Net User Group - Usually meets the fourth Tuesday of each month in Tyson's Corner, VA
• Washington, DC MongoDB Users Group - Usually meets on the third Wednesday of the month. They alternate meeting locations between Silver Springs, MD and Arlington, VA
• Software Patterns & Practices - Usually meets on the third Tuesday of the month in Linthicum Heights, MD though they sometimes go months between meetings..

• Northern Virginia Code Camp - Hosted by Microsoft at their Reston, VA office. Usually meets twice a year on a Saturday.
• Philly .Net Code Camp - Hosted by the Philly .Net User Group. Usually meets twice a year on a Saturday.
• Pittsburgh TechFest - This is a one-day event on a Saturday where software development professionals from Southwestern Pennsylvania (and maybe a little further) get together to talk and learn about perfecting the software development craft.

• Microsoft Virtual Academy
• Visual Studio Toolbox on Microsoft's Channel 9.
• This Week on Channel 9 reviews their opinion of “most-important” news related to Microsoft .Net development both for Windows and the Web.
• Pluralsight is a online developer training, creative and IT courses authored by industry experts. While it is not free, you can learn the most in-demand tech skills from their extensive library.

• dotnetConf is about the .NET Framework topics.
• Microsoft Ignite while being a large on-site conference about Microsoft technologies, provides most of there sessions online as well.
• Microsoft Build is Microsoft's yearly developer conference which provides most of there sessions online as well.
• Norwegian Developers Conference is held each year in Oslo, Norway and recently in London, UK and Sidney, Australia.
• Øredev is held each year in Malmö, Sweden. They also post some of their sessions on Vimeo.

All of these conferences are inexpensive, small at around 500-1000 attendees so most sessions are not overly crowded, don't sell out in “45 seconds”, and are easy to drive to from the Washington, DC area:

• Code PaLOUsa is a 4-day conference held in Louisville, KY during the month of April and is only $300 for the conference and $125 for each “pre” and “post” conference days. If you order early enough, you can get them $250 and $100 respectively.
• Codestock is a 2-day conference held in Knoxville, TN during the month of July. The tickets are usualy around the $250 range.
• CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies, and technology trends in a variety of platforms and development languages.

These are conferences that I have not attended yet, but will keep an eye on them to see if my schedule works out to attend them…

• RevConf is a two-day, platform and language agnostic, software development conference.
• TechBash is a 3-day conference located in the Pocono Mountains in PA. Ticket prices are around the $400 and the venue is a Kalahari Resort which has a 100,000 square foot indoor water park!
• Abstractions is a 3-day conference located in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm not sure what the price of the tickets are as I didn't find out about it until it was already in progress…
• Music City Code is a three-day event touching on all aspects of software, web and mobile development in Knoxville, Tennesee.
• All Things Open is a conference in Raleigh, NC, exploring open source, open tech, and the open web in the enterprise hosted in Raleigh, NC toward the fall of each year.
• The Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that brings together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow's technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, security, and the web located in St. Louis, MO…