[alaties]

It really depends on the conference.

Ones like Strangeloop out in St. Louis offer an incredible diversity of talks, topics, and forums offered: from language deep dives and workshops to architecture talks to rather arcane talks about modifying an automatic sewing machine to print jpegs onto sweaters and more casual forums on topics like validating resilience and durability guarantees of different datastores.

Ones like Google's series on GCP are exactly as you described though.