Professional meetups and conferences have always been a great way to access new networking opportunities, learn about fresh industry trends, better connect with potential customers and partners, and connect with other professionals. Meeting industry professionals helps you keep up-to-speed with new changes in your field and connect with other business minds.

Even a pandemic hasn’t been able to stop the ongoing process of learning and exchanging information. It’s just changed the format from on-site to online. Luckily, face-to-face communication is coming back, and we can slowly get prepared for the roadshows.

Traditionally, September is the month to start attending events, so we’ve prepared a shortlist of professional conferences that we highly recommend you attend and invest your time and resources in. Our shortlist covers several industries and should help you to start the fall geared up for innovation. Have a look and set your business up for success with these premiere software development leadership events.

TestCon Europe 2021

Date: September 7-9 

Format: Online

What to expect:

TestCon Europe is the leading conference for everyone aiming to learn testing trends and best practices and hoping to contribute to smoother software development cycles and improved quality.

The event provides an excellent platform for keeping up to date with the latest industry trends, exchanging experiences, discussing and deliberating ideas, and benefitting from networking opportunities.

The event features the hottest industry topics, including: 

• Test management 
• Testing techniques and methodologies 
• Test automation 
• Performance testing 
• Testing the Internet of things (IoT) 
• Testing metrics 
• Agile testing 
• Test team leadership 
• Soft skills

Our long-time partner with Forte Group, the author of the “Automation Readiness Assessment Checklist” Lee Barnes, will be a speaker at this conference. Having 25 years of experience in the software quality assurance and testing field, Lee will discuss techniques for implementing continuous performance testing in your pipeline, so you don’t have to roll the dice on your user experience. You will learn how to rethink your approach to performance testing and work with your DevOps practices instead of against them in areas like test environment and data management.

Both attendees and speakers will be able to attend workshops and listen to talks online.

As the conference will be online, even if the Covid-19 situation worsens and restrictions return, the event will go ahead without any disruptions.

DevOpsCon 

Date: September 27- 30

Format: Hybrid

Location: New York

What to expect:

To ensure that the lively exchange of knowledge and ideas so typical of DevOpsCon continues to work well, the conference will use a hybrid concept.

You can choose to “attend” the conference either on-site or online from your home or office. In order to be accessible to all participants, all DevOpsCon tracks will be streamed live. Using professional video technology, all talks and workshops will be broadcast live. And that’s not all: you will also be able to get in touch with the speakers and expo partners, even if you don’t attend in person!

All necessary hygiene and distance measures will be in place in the conference hotel, and the number of participants will be limited and carefully monitored.

Thanks to the innovative program and the numerous networking opportunities, the upcoming DevOpsCon will provide the ideal framework for your continuing education. Whether on-site in New York or digitally – the choice is yours!

The event will cover the following industry topics: 

• Business and company culture
• Cloud platforms and serverless
• The Kubernetes ecosystem
• Continuous delivery and automation
• Security
• Microservices and software architecture
• Monitoring, traceability, and diagnostics
• Slideless

With DevOpsCon, you can bring the experience, knowledge, and support of DevOps experts into your home and access recordings of all sessions for one year after the conference.

Site Reliability Engineering 2021

Date: September 30, 20:00 GMT | 15:00 CST

Format: Online

What to expect:

SRE 2021 will bring together engineers that care deeply about Site Reliability, systems engineering, and working with complex distributed systems at scale.

The conference is targeted at engineers who do SRE, those who want to become SREs, or those who are interested in learning what SRE is all about.

We’re looking for quality over quantity. We value the first-hand experience. We want to hear diverse stories, learn about various tools and methods. We want talks that people will send others on YouTube long after the conference is over.

If that sounds good, this is the conference for you!

The conference will cover the following topics:

• Building reliable systems
• Monitoring and alerting
• Distributed systems
• Chaos engineering
• Automated testing

Strange Loop

Date: September 30 – October 2 

Format: In-person

Location: the Union Station Hotel, St. Louis, MO

What to expect:

Strange Loop is a multi-disciplinary conference that brings together the developers and thinkers building tomorrow’s technology in fields such as emerging languages, alternative databases, concurrency, distributed systems, security, and the web.

The conference’s guiding principles include:

• No marketing. Keynotes are never sold to sponsors, and the conference mailing lists are never sold or given to sponsors.
• Tech, not process. In general, talks are code-heavy, not process-oriented (agile, testing, etc.). There are many fine speakers, topics, and workshops in the process area. 
• Technology stew. Interesting stuff happens when you get people from different areas in the same room. Strange Loop has a broad range of topics from academia and industry and a touch of weirdness.
• Moderately priced. Strange Loop jettisons some traditional aspects of a conference and runs lean to provide better value for money.
• Talks are only part of the picture. Strange Loop is not just about learning in traditional sessions. It is also about making connections, sharing ideas, and creating value for the community.
• Reasonable length. Two to three days is the sweet spot for a conference. One-day conferences are not worth the travel time, and conferences longer than three days are not sustainable. If a conference is done right, participants can’t soak in any more information after that point anyway.

Though this will be an in-person event, it will still be possible to be part of a virtual audience.

All Day DevOps

Date: October 28, 09:00 GMT | 04:00 CST

Format: Online

What to expect:

The 6th annual All-day DevOps is on October 28. Starting at 9:00 AM GMT (04:00 AM CST) and continuing for 24 hours, there will be 6 simultaneous tracks, with each track containing a continuous series of 30-minute presentations, for a total of over 90+ hours of presentations. Attendance is free, and the conference is available through online streaming services.

Streamed live, online to the global DevOps/DevSecOps community. 

The All-day DevOps conference is organized by advocates in the DevOps/DevSecOps community, working together to deliver a diverse range of sessions and speakers from all over the world to demonstrate practical uses and technical solutions for DevOps in small and large enterprises.

There will be 186 general sessions and six keynotes.

The topics for discussion will include:

• Modern infrastructure
• DevSecOps and automated security
• CI/CD – continuous everything
• Cultural transformation
• SRE – site reliability engineering
• Government

Every year brings new challenges that you need to be prepared to face. Online and offline events are a great opportunity to learn new challenges and how to confront them. Find the event that suits you and prepare to exchange ideas with your peers and keep tabs on what’s going on in the software development realm.