I've tried several times and never understood what i was doing there...

Not unless I'm forced to. Even before the pandemic, it was really hard to justify the time and expense in attending these things.

Almost never now, and I used to go to lots. In fact I've launched https://opentechcalendar.co.uk/ to try to promote virtual tech events that include community participation instead.

Our local Linux group meets every month. It has become far more general tech focused but still there is always something new that gets demoed. https://humlug.com

Definitely less than before 2020, but in the meanwhile, I built Tech Talks Weekly https://www.techtalksweekly.io/ where I send out all the recently published conference and meetup talks every week.

Yes, in Japan the trend seems to have shifted back toward in-person events. Most meetups and conferences I see now are offline rather than online, definitely more than a year or two ago.

In my opinion, conferences are mostly high noise low signal. My boss went to an "AI conference" last month and all the learnings he shared were things I was advocating already:

- use claude code

- evals are critical

- don't use AI everywhere

I think the conferences are more "work vacations" than work. Maybe they're useful if you think about them this way.