Our company organizes a monthly conference about game development. Like the others said, it's a great way to meet with fellow developers and chat about almost everything - from software architecture to gaming, with a beer at your hand.
Also, after every conference, I feel so inspired and motivated. It's like I recharged my batteries to 100%. Another big benefit of attending conferences is the in-deep material you are presented. For example, 3 days ago, Na'Tosha Bard, the Technical Director for R&D at Unity Technologie came to our meeting and gave a presentation about the development processes inside Unity. We had a chance to chat with her and ask her questions about testing and deployment at Unity. Some of the things she shared with us, we are going to implement in our development process really soon.
Attending conferences is a great way to meet people with the same interests as you, make new friends and learn something new and I would advise everyone who hasn't gone to a conference to go as soon as possible!
I attended and organized conference, I believe it's a good way to learn and meet interesting peoples, I don't like mainstream conference to be honest (like the ones organized by vendor or the techno centric ones, I don't like tutorial like talks ;o) ), but more conference which will give you new insights and to think out of the box. In general what I like the more in conference is the discussions with people between talks and the workshops (if there is workshops options before or after conference take'm and pick some hands-on sessions in conf).
The conference I initiated with a friend is NCrafts (in Paris, France go for it if you can ^^) Other conference that I love : Buildstuff (EU), Codemesh (EU), Lambda days (EU) and StrangeLoop (US)
Notice that all this conferences publish the videos in their website, so the point for attending in person is to take proper times to do it (because you will never take the time to watch all the videos you want lol) and to share with others, the discussions are the most valuable think in conferences.
My 2 cents
There are a lot of local meetups all around the world. You should visit them because:
You can find them in Facebook groups/events in your city or Meetup.com
Conferences are also good if you like travel, meet a lot of new random people, receive a lot of new information, spam your head or you just a speaker and don't have any choice. However, most conferences has their talks or at least presentations online after a while.
Yes, one site to get all the near conferences in your area are Meetup, in my experience i went to conferences, kata, expositions, and it's interesting to share with other people.
And you may learn something new related to tests, ddd, or some other new stuff that can help you :)
yes and they can :) to put is brief. ofc you need to pick the ones that are right for you :)
Ben Buchanan (200ok)
I make some bits of the web.
tldr: yes and yes ;)
Longer version is that I would distinguish conferences from meetups as they are a bit different.
Conferences being usually-annual, large whole-day or multi-day events; usually cost a bit (from hundreds to a couple of thousand dollars) often with a mix of local and international speakers. These events are valuable for bigger ideas and deeper-dive topics, plus cross-pollination of ideas between nations via the international speakers. They are more of an "occasion" and social events are often very well-attended and people generally make a bigger deal of them. There are good networking opportunities but you may also find with people travelling to the event that you maintain contact only online between yearly events.
Meetups being usually monthly (or at least several times a year), for a couple of hours; usually free or cheap (a few bucks for the beer and pizza kind of thing); with a focus on local speakers and practical knowledge sharing. You are likely to see early iterations of talks that end up at conferences. These events have a more casual tone and successful meetups tend to grow to be communities with a meetup rather than simply events. They are great for discussing what you've been working on, sharing tips and tricks, talking about industry-level issues, plus they tend to be open to recruiting within reasonable boundaries (most will have a specified time during the evening where people can stand up and say they are hiring; but aggressive recruiters are likely to get the Quiet Word to tone it down or leave).
Basically the benefits of these things include:
Networking is not just for recruiting, by the way - particularly if you are on a small team, or a sole-trading contractor, these events often build those contacts you can reach out to when you are really stuck on something technical. Or you might see someone talking about solving a problem you are about to face, or facing right now.