Conferences are back and they're better than ever. The last few years have shown us that it is entirely possible to organize and attend an engaging conference, with dozens of speakers across multiple days, in an entirely online environment. While most conferences are in-person once more, many now have an online component that makes them all the more interesting.
The below conferences are tailored specifically for engineering managers, i.e. the people who lead teams of engineers. They focus on cutting-edge technology, security, project management methodologies, and programming best practices. These engineering manager conferences are great opportunities to learn, network, and demonstrate your commitment to lifelong learning.
January
CES
- Date: January 5 - 8
- Location: Online, Las Vegas
- Ticket Price: $279 (online) - $1,275 (Las Vegas)
Branded "the most influential tech event in the world", CES showcases the latest and greatest in consumer technology, from 3D printing to robotics to quantum computing. It is a gigantic event with over 3,100 exhibitors, including 323 of the Fortune Global 500.
NDC London
- Date: January 23 - 27
- Location: London
- Ticket Price: £1,450 - £3,250
NDC launched in Oslo in 2008 as a conference for .NET and Agile development. Since then, it has grown to encompass all technologies relevant for software developers and engineering managers. If you can't make it to the NDC in London, there are other NDCs in Oslo and Porto.
February
FOSDEM
- Date: February 4 - 5
- Location: Brussels
- Ticket Price: Free!
FOSDEM is a two-day event in the capital of Europe that promotes the use of open-source software. FOSDEM's events include keynotes, developer rooms with specific information about an open-source topic, lightning talks where speakers only have fifteen minutes to talk about something open-source, and stands to get in touch with open-source projects.
Deep Learning Summit
- Date: February 8 - 9
- Location: Amsterdam
- Ticket Price: TBD
The Deep Learning Summit brings together the latest technological advancements in AI with practical examples of how you can use AI to solve problems in your company (or in society at large). Conference speakers are either AI academics or industry experts, and topics include data efficiency, meta-learning, and deep neural networks.
DevExecWorld
- Date: February 15 - 23
- Location: Online, Oakland
- Ticket Price: $100 - $895
DevExecWorld is a conference specifically geared toward leadership roles in the tech industry, whether that's CTOs, engineering managers, technicians, or others. Topics include how to scale a development team, how to lead developers, how to build a diverse team, and emerging engineering trends.
March
DevOps Live
- Date: March 8 - 9
- Location: London
- Ticket Price: Free!
With over 10,000 attendees across two days, DevOps Live is the largest gathering of DevOps and cloud professionals. This year's themes for the conference are DevOps in the enterprise, DevSecOps, Cloud Native, and skills/talent/culture. DevOps Live is part of the Tech Show London, the UK's most important tech event.
Agile International Conference
- Date: March 9 - 10
- Location: Miami
- Ticket Price: $399 - $499
Agile software development has been extremely popular for over two decades, to the point where "agile" is now a term that can extend to many other processes across a business. The Agile International Conference will see speakers talk about product management, business agility, enterprise Agile transformations, and more.
LeadDev
- Date: March 14 - 15
- Location: New York
- Ticket Price: $999 - $2,998
LeadDev is a great conference for engineering managers because it focuses on effective engineering management and leadership. LeadDev New York will give you the ability to better understand engineering metrics, nurture team culture, create growth strategies, and build effective engineering teams.
April
Laval Virtual
- Date: April 12 - 16
- Location: Laval (France)
- Ticket Price: €77 - €154
Already in its 25th edition, Laval Virtual is the biggest AR/VR/Metaverse event worldwide, with over 10,000 attendees and 200 exhibitors. If you're curious about how good AR and VR technologies have become and how they can transform business processes, this is the conference to visit.
International JavaScript Conference
- Date: April 24 - 27
- Location: Online, London
- Ticket Price: £494 - £1079
The JavaScript ecosystem is enormous, so it should come as no surprise that there are many conferences devoted to it. The International JavaScript Conference is one of the more technical ones, with sessions that discuss A11y testing in Angular, microservices architecture in Node.js, and how to optimize Angular runtime performance.
API Conference
- Date: April 24 - 27
- Location: London
- Ticket Price: £494 - £1,079
Not many conferences focus exclusively on API design and management, but the API conference does. If you want to learn more about the latest trends in web APIs and API design, and how tools like GraphQL and Swagger fit into an API project, this is the conference for you.
May
Women in Tech Conference
- Date: May 9 - 12
- Location: Online
- Ticket Price: $49 - $790
This is the largest conference for women in tech, bringing together talent from all over the world in an online conference with over 100,000 (!) visitors and 700 speakers. Topics include leadership & company culture, navigating the C-suite as a working mother, founders in tech entrepreneurship, and more.
Devoxx UK
- Date: May 10 - 12
- Location: London
- Ticket Price: £545 - £745
Already in its tenth edition, Devoxx UK is a popular developer community conference that welcomes over 13,000 developers every year. There are over 170 sessions, covering Java, AI, robotics, security, and developer best practices. There's something for everyone here!
MIT Sloan CIO Symposium
- Date: May 15 - 16
- Location: Cambridge, MA
- Ticket Price: $495 - $995
As the premier CIO event in the United States, the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium brings together IT executives from around the world with leading faculty members from MIT. Panelists and speakers will discuss the future of technology and tech best practices. If you want to know what's on the minds of the most powerful CIOs and CDOs, this is a great conference to attend.
June
Gartner Security & Risk Management Summit
- Date: June 5 - 7
- Location: Washington
- Ticket Price: $3,925 - $4,300
Gartner is one of the most respected tech consultancy firms in the world, best known for their Magic Quadrant market research report. Their Security & Risk Management Summit in Washington brings together CISOs, Security Execs, Risk Management Leaders, and Data Security Managers to discuss contemporary challenges in privacy, risk, and security.
American CIO & IT Summit
- Date: June 6 - 7
- Location: Chicago
- Ticket Price: x
Possibly the most exclusive conference on this list, the American CIO & IT summit is invite-only. Featured speakers for the 2023 event include the CISO of HP, the CIO of Honeywell, and the CIO of Daimler Trucks NA, among others. The conference is on this list because many of the sessions will be made available online once the conference is over; perfect if you don't have an invite.
Collision
- Date: June 26 - 29
- Location: Toronto
- Ticket Price: CA$ 445 - CA$ 12,495
Collision is one of the largest tech conferences in North America, with over 35,000 attendees every year. Previous speakers included the CEO of GitHub, actress Lupita Nyong'o, the CEO of Substack, the Founder of Calendly, and the former CEO of Google Eric Schmidt.
July
Block 3000
- Date: July 6 - 7
- Location: Lisbon
- Ticket Price: €300 - €2,000
Block 3000 is Europe's largest international conference about blockchain, web 3.0, and cryptocurrencies. If you live in Europe and are curious about anything blockchain-related (DeFi, NFTs, even the Metaverse), this is an interesting conference to attend.
ProductCon Online
- Date: July 20
- Location: Online
- Ticket Price: Free (early bird) - $149
ProductCon is the largest online product management conference in the world, and tickets are free until the early bird sale ends on April 12 this year. ProductCon presents its visitors with keynotes and speaker sessions from product leaders at Facebook, Amazon, Google, and many other big tech companies.
Agile2023
- Date: July 24 - 28
- Location: Orlando
- Ticket Price: $1,849 - $2,599
The Agile Alliance is a global non-profit membership organization that's founded on the seminal Manifesto for Agile Software Development. They organize an annual conference where attendees can explore and advance Agile values and principles in a space where people and ideas flourish.
August
DEF CON
- Date: August 10 - 13
- Location: Las Vegas
- Ticket Price: TBD
Talk about a legendary conference. DEF CON will organize its 31st conference in 2023. It's the ultimate hacker conference, with its ticket price TBD and only payable in cash. Anyone who has a general interest in software, computer architecture, hardware modification, or anything hackable should be interested in this conference.
Blockchain Futurist Conference
- Date: August 14 - 17
- Location: Toronto
- Ticket Price: $99 - $299
Canada's largest crypto, web 3, and blockchain event, the Blockchain Futurist Conference is already in its fifth edition. Past speakers included the founder of Ethereum, the founder of Solana, and legendary radio host Larry King. The conference has a hackathon, NFT galleries, crypto training for beginners, marketplaces, and more.
DevCom
- Date: August 20 - 25
- Location: Online, Cologne
- Ticket Price: TBD
DevCom is Europe's biggest community-driven game developer conference. It is the official game developer event of gamescom, which is the world's largest computer and videogames event. Much of the conference will be streamed on its official Twitch channel.
September
SaaStr Annual
- Date: September 6 - 8
- Location: San Francisco
- Ticket Price: $799 - $1,549
SaaStr focuses on everything SaaS. Every year, over 12,500 cloud and SaaS founders, VCs, and execs come together in a conference with over a hundred sessions about the best in SaaS, VC matchmaking, and AMAs with top industry experts, as well as a festival, outdoorsy vibe that make it unlike any other conference on this list.
Industry of Things World
- Date: September 17 - 19
- Location: Berlin
- Ticket Price: €2,549 - €3,249
Industry of Things World is the leading industrial IoT event in Europe. Its main focus is industry 4.0 and how companies can take advantage of digitization, networking, and big data. Speakers include the Director of Supply Chain Learning at Coca-Cola and the Global Incubation Director at Engie.
Digital Transformation Week
- Date: September 26 - 27
- Location: Online, Amsterdam
- Ticket Price: Free!
The Digital Transformation week is a free in-person event in Amsterdam with over 5,000 attendees, the majority of which are Director level or higher. Digital transformation is at the heart of this conference, and topics include AI, big data, blockchain, IoT, edge computing, and cybersecurity.
October
QCon
- Date: October 2 - 6
- Location: San Francisco
- Ticket Price: TBD
QCon is a long-running conference about understanding the emerging software trends you should pay attention to. For this year, that includes topics like WASM, software ethics, MLOps, Kubernetes strategies, and much more. QCon is a conference for the first two days, after which it switches to a workshop format for the last two days.
Coalesce Online
- Date: October 16 - 20
- Location: Online, San Diego
- Ticket Price: Free (online) or $700 (San Diego)
Coalesce is an analytics engineering conference. Have a look at its 2022 talk replays for an idea of the topics: scaling your data team, refactoring an inherited project, data automation, metadata, and data accessibility.
Google Cloud Next
- Date: TBD
- Location: TBD
- Ticket Price: TBD
As an engineering manager, it's quite likely you're currently using or have used a Google product. Google Cloud Next is the best conference for staying updated with all Google's products. If you're curious about how their 2022 conference went, here's a 13-minute video summary.
November
Microsoft Ignite
- Date: November 15 - 16
- Location: TBD
- Ticket Price: TBD
Just as Google Cloud Next is the best conference to know about Google's products, Microsoft Ignite is the best to know about Microsoft's products. Expect keynotes from Microsoft's C-level execs and partner stories about how they used Microsoft products.
December
AI & Big Data Global
- Date: November 30 - December 1
- Location: London
- Ticket Price: TBD
The AI & Big Data Global conference focuses on the use of next-generation technologies and strategies to make companies more productive. Over 6,000 attendees congregate for the event, including CIOs, data analysts, tech providers, chief data scientists, and many others.
AWS re:Invent
- Date: TBD
- Location: Las Vegas
- Ticket Price: TBD
AWS re:Invent is Amazon's biggest conference and usually comes with a swathe of impactful, exciting product and service launches tied to cloud infrastructure and AWS services. The conference is usually in early December, and is a great way to end the year with one of the biggest and most inspiring engineering manager conferences.
