Conferences
recruiting and career fairs
Section titled “recruiting and career fairs”| Event | Dates | About |
|---|---|---|
| Grace Hopper Celebration | September to October | The largest career fair for women and nonbinary technologists, with on-site interviews and a heavy corporate presence. |
| ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing | September | A diversity in computing conference that draws industry recruiters and graduate programs in roughly equal measure. |
| Out for Undergrad Tech | Fall | An application-only career conference for LGBTQ+ undergraduates, run in partnership with large tech sponsors. |
| SHPE National Convention | October to November | One of the largest STEM career fairs in the country and a common destination for ASU engineering students. |
| NSBE Annual Convention | March | A large corporate career fair and convention for Black engineers. |
arizona and drivable
Section titled “arizona and drivable”| Event | Dates | About |
|---|---|---|
| DEF CON | Las Vegas, August | The largest hacker convention in the world, covering hardware hacking, red teaming, and CTFs. Roughly a five hour drive from Phoenix. |
| Black Hat USA | Las Vegas, August | Enterprise security research briefings and a large vendor hall, held the same week as DEF CON. |
| CactusCon Arizona | Phoenix area, February | The largest security conference in the Southwest, with cheap student tickets, hands-on villages, and a CTF. |
industry and developer conferences
Section titled “industry and developer conferences”| Event | Dates | About |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Universe | San Francisco, October to November | Developer tooling, open source, and Copilot. A free virtual pass is usually available. |
| KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America | November | Kubernetes, containers, and observability, run by the open source infrastructure community. |
| AWS re:Invent | Las Vegas, December | Cloud infrastructure and distributed systems at very large scale. |
| NVIDIA GTC | San Jose, March | GPUs, CUDA, and generative AI infrastructure. Most sessions are free to watch online. |
| Microsoft Build | Seattle, May | Azure, GitHub Copilot, and Microsoft developer tooling. Free to watch online. |
| Google I/O | Mountain View, May | Android, web, and Gemini developer tooling. The keynote and sessions stream free. |
| PyCon US | May | The Python language and community conference, with discounted student registration. |
| Apple WWDC | Cupertino, June | iOS, macOS, Swift, and on-device machine learning. Free to watch online. |