To avoid suited-up crowds, she created her own conference: Peers

D.C.-based web developer Jess D’Amico never enjoyed the suited-up crowds and corporate atmosphere of giant conferences. So she created her own get-together, one for the smaller masses.
“I always feel at a big big event that you get lost in the crowd,” she said. Past the first couple hundred guests, she added, people “just have a different reaction and it changes their vibe.”

Peers is an annual three-day affair for PHP developers from across the country. It started out with about 70 attendees in Chicago in June 2013. The goal for this year’s conference in Philadelphia (April 30-May 2) is to draw in 200 guests, said D’Amico.
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At Peers Conf, prestigious pedigrees are not a requirement to present. “For a lot of big conferences, there’s sort of a known speaker circuit,” said D’Amico. “We try to foster different speakers, first-time speakers.”
Once they’re off the podium, they’re more accessible, too: They mingle. And because it turns out that the PHP developer crowd is rather tight knit, but spread out, coworkers will occasionally meet for the first time at Peers.  “We work better together,” said D’Amico.
D’Amico had some organizing experience with the Laracon Conference and had founded the DCeers Meetup group for ExpressionEngine faithfuls.
But putting together a yearly conference practically single-handedly turned out to be another ball game. With so many involved, “unpredictable things” always seemed to pop up, she said.
Still, the exercise bore similarities with her web development work. “It kind of chunks up into modules that are similar to the way you would approach web work,” she said.