Conferences, open source, and the US versus China

Viktor Farcic: Right now, you're the CTO of CloudBees, where you're in charge of technology. I'm curious; how do you follow up with all of that? I'm asking this simply because I don't know how to do it myself. Every time I visit a conference, I have the impression that I need another year just to learn what each of those programs does.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi: I wish I knew the answer. I, too, struggle with keeping up with what's going on. I find it useful to go to conferences because people there are trying to explain things to you, as opposed to expecting you to grok things on your own. At the same time, in the grand scheme of things, people like you and I are probably good at making sense of the rough bits out there, so from that perspective, going to conferences is a bit of a waste of time because we'd probably learn a lot more on our own in the same amount of time it takes to travel. Also, when...