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Historical developer conferences

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The conferences that no longer exist are part of the developer-events story. Many of them were enormously influential in their time, and their formats and traditions live on in the events that replaced them.

OSCON: O’Reilly Open Source Convention

  • First held. 1999, Monterey, California.
  • Cadence. Annual.
  • Primary location. Portland, Oregon (2003 to 2019).
  • Operator. O’Reilly Media.
  • Discontinued. 2019 (the year of the last in-person edition; O’Reilly subsequently exited the conference business broadly).
  • Significance. For 20 years, OSCON was the canonical open-source conference. The discontinuation in 2019 was one of the more visible signals of how conference economics had shifted.

MIX (Microsoft)

  • Years. 2006 to 2011.
  • Focus. Microsoft web technologies (initially Silverlight, IE, web design).
  • Replaced by. Microsoft Build (2011).

Microsoft PDC: Professional Developers Conference

  • Years. 1992 to 2010.
  • Focus. The “real” Microsoft developer conference of its era. Where major Windows, .NET, and platform announcements happened.
  • Replaced by. Microsoft Build (2011).

Intel Developer Forum (IDF)

  • Years. 1997 to 2017.
  • Focus. Intel platform direction, processor announcements, ecosystem partnerships.
  • Discontinued. 2017.
  • Replaced by. Intel Innovation (2022).

Apple’s pre-iPhone-era developer events

  • Apple’s Macworld Expo. Separate from WWDC but historically a major developer venue. Apple withdrew from Macworld after 2009.
  • Apple’s various developer-specific tours of the 1990s and 2000s.

SXSW Interactive (developer relevance peak: 2007 to 2013)

  • Founded. 1994 as part of the broader SXSW festival.
  • Developer significance. From the mid-2000s through approximately 2013, SXSW Interactive served as the launch venue for some major developer-relevant products: Twitter notably broke out at SXSW 2007, Foursquare and others at later editions.
  • Decline of developer relevance. Mid-2010s, as developer-product launches moved to more focused venues (TechCrunch Disrupt, Y Combinator demo day, dedicated developer conferences). SXSW Interactive continues but has shifted toward broader tech-business audience.

Strata Data Conference

  • Years. 2011 to 2019.
  • Operator. O’Reilly Media (also discontinued as part of O’Reilly’s 2019 exit from conferences).
  • Focus. Big data, data engineering.
  • Significance. Defined the data-engineering conference category through the 2010s.

JavaOne (original Sun era)

  • First held. 1996.
  • Operator. Sun, then Oracle.
  • Discontinued. 2017 (by Oracle).
  • Revived. 2022 by Oracle. The revived version is not at the original’s scale.

TwilioCon (original branding)

  • Years. 2011 to 2013.
  • Renamed. SIGNAL, 2015.

Heroku Waza, Salesforce Connections

  • Heroku Waza. Annual celebration event; ran 2012 to 2013 then evolved with Heroku into Salesforce’s broader event portfolio.

Lotusphere (IBM Lotus / Notes)

  • Years. 1994 to 2012.
  • Significance. Until cut by IBM’s broader transition away from Lotus branding, Lotusphere was one of the larger enterprise-developer events in the world.

Borland Developer Conference (BorCon)

  • Years. Late 1980s through mid-2000s.
  • Discontinued. As Borland declined, Embarcadero, which acquired its developer tools in 2008, maintained smaller developer events.

Various Sun developer-tour events

  • Sun Tech Days, JavaTech Days. Travelling worldwide tour events that ran through the early 2000s. Discontinued after Oracle acquisition.

Defunct virtual-conference operators

Several virtual-conference platform operators rose and fell during 2020 to 2023:

  • Crowdcast. Originally a creator-focused video platform, briefly significant in pandemic-era developer events; less prominent today.
  • Run The World. Acquired by Webflow in 2022.
  • Welcome. Acquired by Zoom 2021.
  • Airmeet, Spatial.io. Active but smaller.
  • Hopin. Rebranded RingCentral Events; Hopin’s spectacular pandemic-era growth and subsequent restructuring is a study in market conditions.

EvangelistsConf

  • Years. Mid-2010s.
  • Focus. Developer evangelism as a profession (essentially a DevRelCon predecessor by some interpretations).
  • Discontinued. Not formally announced; site evangelistsconference.com survives.

What disappearance teaches

A few patterns from the historical record:

  • Vendor flagship conferences usually outlive the vendors’ independence. JavaOne survived the Sun → Oracle transition (with a break). SIGNAL has survived through Twilio’s various corporate moves. HashiConf is being absorbed into IBM TechXchange post-acquisition rather than being killed.
  • Independent conferences are fragile. OSCON, Strata, MIX: all subject to the operator’s strategic priorities.
  • Conferences die slowly. A common pattern: attendance flatlines, sponsorship revenue declines, the operator skips a year “to redesign,” and never returns. OSCON’s last edition was 2019; the discontinuation was effectively announced by quietly not running 2020 even before the pandemic.
  • The formats persist. OSCON’s two-track-plus-tutorials format, JavaOne’s session-and-BOF model, PDC’s announcement-driven keynotes: every modern flagship inherits something from these predecessors.

See also