In the Age of AI, the Hallway Track Matters More Than Ever
A few years ago, I wrote about what makes a great conference experience. My answer was the people. After years of attending conferences as an attendee, speaker, sponsor, and organizer, I’ve seen too many valuable conversations happen outside the session rooms to think otherwise.
You can watch a talk online. You might even prefer to pause it, watch it at 2x, replay the tricky bit, and try the code while it is fresh in your mind. I do that too. But you cannot download the conversation that starts when the person beside you turns around after a session and says, “We tried that at work. Here’s what happened.”
I think that distinction matters even more now.
AI is changing how developers work. It can help us write code, tests, documentation, and prototypes faster than we could before. We still need to decide what to build, understand where it fits, spot the problems it introduces, and work with other people to put it into production. The tools are moving quickly enough that even experienced developers are figuring out some of this as they go.
That is one reason to attend a conference in person. A talk can show you what is possible. A conversation can tell you what happened when someone tried it on a real team, with an old codebase, a security review, and a deadline.
I have always called those conversations the hallway track. They happen over lunch, between sessions, at a reception, or while you are waiting for a flight home. Someone tells you how they are using an AI coding assistant. You ask whether their team trusts the generated tests. Another person joins in with a completely different approach. By the time you reach the next session, you have three things to try and two people you can ask when you get stuck.
That exchange is hard to reproduce by watching a recording alone.
There is also a career reason to get out and meet people, although I want to be careful about how I put it. I do not believe attending a conference will secure anyone’s job. I do believe that, as more routine tech tasks are automated, it will become increasingly valuable to be someone others know, trust, and want to work with.
That trust grows when you share what you have learned, listen to someone else’s problem, follow up with a useful introduction, or help a stranger think through their code. Conferences give us room to do those things with people outside our usual teams. The relationships may lead to a collaboration, a new role, or a friend you can call years later. Often, you will have no idea which conversation mattered until much later.
None of this means you must be brilliant at “networking.” Frankly, that word makes the whole thing sound like another task to optimize. Start smaller. Ask the person next to you what brought them to the talk. Tell a speaker which part you are going to test when you get home. If you hear someone describe a problem you have faced, share what worked for you—and what did not.
The same goes for the technical side of a conference. Go to sessions. Learn the new tools. Ask hard questions about what AI does well and where it fails. Then stay for the conversations afterward. The speaker may have left out the exact detail you need, or another attendee may be facing the same challenge in a completely different industry.
Online content gives developers extraordinary access to knowledge, and I hope it continues to. An in-person conference gives us something to do with that knowledge together.
As AI changes the tasks we perform, I suspect the people we learn from and build with will matter more to our careers, not less. So watch the talks you missed when they appear online. But if you can make it to a conference, make time for the hallway track and say hello to someone. You never know where that conversation might lead.
Vincent Mayers
