A bored academic going to Containerday 2024

Some Context

Working in university I attended many conferences and workshops from the academic world. At this point it has been 4 years, first as a research fellow (1 year) and then as a PhD student.

Academic conferences are great per se, but I always felt like the networking opportunities were somewhat limited. Limited to academia, that is. You meet tons of incredible people, you attend to talks about innovative projects (they are literally pushing the state of the art in their fields), and you get to do some touristic activities. Academic conferences are indeed great. My problem is that I also want to be open to opportunities outside academia, or “in the industry” as we call it.

In those kind of conferences you can surely meet and become friends with awesome people, but the biggest opportunities that you can get will still be within academia. Maybe you find a nice research group with a postdoc position open, or even an engineering position but still as a fixed-term contract on a single research project.

My priorities shifted a bit, and perhaps even my interests. Now that I’m at the end of my Ph.D. I want a stable job where I can work on projects that can solve problems or unlock new possibilities for real users.

Clue in Containerday 2024

Some months ago I thought that the best way to start getting close to the industry was to attend industry events. I’m based in Bologna so the logical choice was to find local events. I found out about serveral, actually, and decided to get a ticket for Containerday 2024 since it’s about a topic very close to my research area.

Well I’m kinda lying here. I have a part-time job at a startup so I’m not that stranger to industry. But still, I want to get more exposure.

The Day

The day finally arrived. I was excited and a nervous at the same time. I admit, in the day before I almost thought about not going, but I didn’t want the ticket to go to waste.

Once there I had a great time. There were many companies with booths and I went to talk to almost all of them. The talks were all very interesting. They were about real projects that you could go and actually use. I think they were all open-source too.

It was a nice change. It can happen that in academic conferences you go to present your own work (finally it was accepted and you gotta do it for the publication), but then you don’t really care about the other talks.

Here I was genuinely interested in all of them and got some new project ideas too.

The meeting other people part this time was even the best part. I met brilliant people from many different companies, and in one there were also a couple of Phds that moved to industry (like what I want to do!). I think in total I did a good impression on people from 4 different companies. It gave me the confidence to already start applying for jobs.

The event per se was handled very well. The location, the organization, the food, the talks were all top-notch. And let’s not forget the tons of gadgets I got!

Conclusion

Containerday 2024 was awesome. It showed me there is a world outside academia that I can be part of and now I want to go to more events like this. I’m already looking for the next one, and for sure I will parteicipate in Containerday 2025.