My experience this year was exactly the opposite to yours. I too have been going for several years, and after a couple of "I'm done; not coming back next year", I decided to have change my approach.
This year I established 5 basic principles:
1. Absolutely no panels. Only solo or dual sessions.
2. No marketing sessions (nor sessions by marketing folks)
3. No keynotes (except for Snowden and Assange)
4. Go beyond the headline, and analyze the speaker. At minimum the person must have an interesting personal or professional story, regardless the talk.
5. The more technical or obscure the session, the better.
In the end this strategy paid off nicely. This was one of the best years, and the first to make me want to come back next year. I watched some gems like Philip Rosedale (Second Life, now High Fidelity), Pinterest engineers talking about their dev stack in a candid and informal conversation, Carl Bass from Autodesk, Print the Legend (the movie, and then the discussion with the film directors, plus Max from FormLabs and an ex-MakerBot), NASA, DARPA, nice demos at Startup Accelerator, and a lot more.
I certainly missed a few nice keynotes (like Neil deGrasse Tyson), but hopefully some of the sessions will be posted later.
This year I established 5 basic principles:
1. Absolutely no panels. Only solo or dual sessions.
2. No marketing sessions (nor sessions by marketing folks)
3. No keynotes (except for Snowden and Assange)
4. Go beyond the headline, and analyze the speaker. At minimum the person must have an interesting personal or professional story, regardless the talk.
5. The more technical or obscure the session, the better.
In the end this strategy paid off nicely. This was one of the best years, and the first to make me want to come back next year. I watched some gems like Philip Rosedale (Second Life, now High Fidelity), Pinterest engineers talking about their dev stack in a candid and informal conversation, Carl Bass from Autodesk, Print the Legend (the movie, and then the discussion with the film directors, plus Max from FormLabs and an ex-MakerBot), NASA, DARPA, nice demos at Startup Accelerator, and a lot more.
I certainly missed a few nice keynotes (like Neil deGrasse Tyson), but hopefully some of the sessions will be posted later.