Even as someone who had never written a line of Laravel in my life when my company sent me, I was welcomed and found that I could understand many of the talks. Some, of course, sent over my head, but there were others there who really got alot of of those as well.
http://www.ceacbrasil.com/bscg/
Unfortunately, not there this year.
dcdevfest: this was a great conference right in the midatlanti area in the capital one hq. was really a good crowd interested in a bunch of deep tech talks. nice facilities, not much in the way of vendor space.
aws reinvent - really always enjoy this because it's really the big event of the year. everyone who's involved in technology/cloud/whatever shows up to learn, pitch and hang out. there's some feelings of traditional "trade show" buy there's value in the whole experience. vegas is a bit much.
mongodb world - a good event if you are specific to this market. workshops are helpful.
You can watch last years talk from Netflix, Spotify, Slack, Intercom, Facebook etc http://383project.com/blog/canvas-2016-the-full-talks/
