The community - a route to free training

I presented last night at the West Yorkshire BCS and received a number of comments that it was great to see free training being available. This for me is one of the most important areas of our community, and an area we are very lucky with. There are plenty of opportunities to access knowledge…..

Of late we have seen that the big vendor conferences (such as Microsoft’s TechEd, PDC and MIX) and the platform independent developer conferences (such as NDC) streaming their sessions live for free and also have their sessions available for free download within a few days. Microsoft’ Channel 9 is also an excellent resource of conference sessions and specially made material on a vast range of subjects from language design to scheduling of the buses on Microsoft campus. Or if you prefer to listen to something whist your drive why not try the .Net Rocks podcast. There are plenty more specialist resources out there on the web.

At the national level in the UK we also have vendor events such as Microsoft UK Techdays, and company run events like my company’s Black Marbles free events.

Outside company structures we have community events like DDD (general .NET interest) and SQLBits (SQL specific). These are free community run conferences where the members of the community submit session ideas, these are voted for by the community and a free Saturday conference is run using usually the  20 most popular sessions. Again, increasing some of these sessions are videoed and made available on the web.

At the even more local level there are always usergroup. In Leeds we have the BCS, Agile Yorkshire, Leeds SQL Usergroup, GeekUp and more I am sure I have not heard of. This pattern is reflected across the OK, it is just a matter of searching to see what is near you.

So there is no excuse for not trying to keep up to date, whether you want to learn via the web or in person. Why not have a look?