The key is meeting people who are interested in similar things, or working on similar problems.

That's it - that's the entirety of it.

The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.

I've run a very small (~20) conference over the last 15 yrs and this is basically the plan. We even had it on a cruise ship one year. The friendships, and collaborations that have ensued are a testament to its effectiveness.

(To be honest we do have a few short talks and an agenda to guide the discussions, but these are mostly requirements of the funding that we've found)

> The dirty secret is conferences would be much better if they simply had no sessions scheduled at all, and locked everyone in the ballroom for the entire day.

I've been to conferences where I simply forgot to attend any talks at all, simply because I was too busy/having fun chatting to people.

A lot of the more "professional" conferences have stands just for paying sponsors though, and usually not a lot of them. They tend to be a lot less lively than open source conferences and the like which allow any ol' open source project to set up a stand. I like stands because they're a good conversation starter, and in many ways also like a presentation yet a lot more informal.

Unfortunately all of that died with COVID in my area, and hasn't really started back up since :-(

Corollary to this is that Conferences are judged not by their overt content, but by their curation of the un-conferences / birds-of-a-feather meetings that they facilitate.

You can walk up to and pester really smart people and have a conversation with them. If you have ideas you want to discuss with your peers, this is a great place. Or if you want to hire somebody, or keep your ears out for a better job, it's a great place to network. Give yourself an objective or two over the period of the con, and consider the rest of the time just a way to collect ideas, and maybe sightsee if you get bored. You may also prefer unconferences.

Never go to the sessions at a commercial conference. Academic conferences may be different. The vendor fair and social interactions are the only useful part of a conference.

Meeting people is a big part of it. Even if you're not very social, I found attending conferences to be great for understanding what people are doing now, getting a feel for the personalities in my field, and making connections and just learning.

When I used to go to more academic conferences, I mostly went to smaller tight-knit ones where most people knew each other. I found that much more interesting than the big ones with thousands of people which definitely feel more anonymous and take way more work to meet people in, and end up being closer to what you'd get from attending something online.

Tldr, try going to a ~100 person niche conference in your specific field, or at least one that has tracks that emulate that

> Tldr, try going to a ~100 person niche conference in your specific field,

Where does one find conferences that small? Everything I've seen (is|seems to be) for large-ish conferences? Large-ish being defined as the ones with the "anonymous feel".