zlacker

>If you go to a tech conference with expensive tickets and pay out of pocket and aren't buying or selling anything contemplate what you are doing with your life.

If you can get a free pass as a speaker or otherwise and the conference is somewhere you'd like to spend some time anyway, it can make sense to spend a day or two at an event if it's something you're really interested in. But I agree in general that I'm not going to spend $1K+ out of my own pocket to attend a big commercial conference for fun.