Stack Exchange Gets In The Conference Game With Stack Overflow DevDays

Q&A network Stack Exchange will be launching Stack Overflow DevDays this fall, a two day series of conferences targeting coders who want to brush up or dive into the latest programming technologies like MongoDB, HTML 5 and Coffeescript, with hour long tutorials put on by speakers culled from the developer community.

Says Stack Overflow co-founder Joel Spolsky on the motivation behind launching a conference,

“Think of all the programmers using slightly old-fashioned programming languages like PHP and Java because that’s what their employers make them use… but they would LOVE to have a chance to learn the hot new things. Last year it was Ruby on Rails and jQuery. This year it’s HTML5, Coffeescript and Node.js.

We set out to organize a conference that would be perfect for these programmers… a series of one hour basic tutorials on the hottest things that everybody wants to learn right now.”

While Stack Overflow did hold an early one-day version of DevDays back in 2009, Spolsky tells me that this time they mean business. The company has hired three people with conference producing experience (one of them, Alex Miller, also worked on TechCrunch 50) in order to handle the five different conferences in the fall, including the developer conferences in San Francisco, Sydney, London and DC as well as a Sys-Admin conference in San Francisco.

Spolsky tells me his goal is to keep the price of DevDays as affordable as possible at $499 and is offering a $100 discount for TechCrunch readers who use the discount code “techcrunch.” He expects several thousand developers to attend (sounds like tech recruiter paradise). Those interested can learn more about DevDays here.