Industry Conferences and the Daily Grind

So when I'm not making mojitos and playing World of Warcraft, I am a web developer for University of Arizona. My boss considers "keeping abreast of industry developments" to be one of my primary duties, so I read lots of industry news, including a decent number of blogs. (I keep meaning to post a blogroll, but I'm sooooo lazy.)

This past weekend was BloggerCon, and the folks over at Monkey Bites were in attendence. Yet another industry conference in I have no chance of going to, because I don't actually work in the industry. (Actually, BloggerCon is actually more of an un-industry un-conference, but the point of this post is conferences.)

Most of the time, I don't mind the differences between the education sector and the private sector. I've learned to swallow the crappy pay, the fact that I'm a single webmaster with a single site rather than part of a team, and the total lack of anything resembling a "development budget". But conferences, especially the big ones like SXSW and Web 2.0, remind me of the divide between people who work "in the industry" and me. They have money for conferences and training, we don't. In industry, there is a constant push for innovation and excellence, in education many times the goal is just getting by.

I am a passionate web designer and developer. I'm opinionated about user interface design, web standards, and accessibility. When I first started working on websites for a living, I soaked up information about how to do the best job possible like a sponge. I could literally tell you every supported and non-supported CSS property in all the major browsers at the time. Now my days are mostly spent doing updates and day-to-day maintenence. I feel like my enthusiasm for web technologies has waned, and I'm burnt out and jaded.

So I guess this is really a post about the daily grind. Conferences are a break from the daily grind. I suppose vacations and the more flexible schedule that I get from working in education are too. Mostly I miss the opportunity to talk to other people who are passionate about the things that I am passionate about - to hear their ideas and bounce my ideas off of them. Surely there must be some way for me to get that here at the University. In the meantime, I'll live vicariously through conference blogging.