Questions on experience in getting your work published

I'm sure some of you recognize me as that annoying jerk face who won't shut his face about Java and ML, but if I haven't worn out my welcome I was hoping to get some people's feedback on getting stuff published.

Some general questions I'd love to get other people's opinions / thoughts on:

• How do you deal with reviewers being overly negative about your work? Both in terms of a response and not letting it ruin your weekend

• If you've ever done a transition: how do you go about learning where to potentially publish? I have a lot of experience reading Machine Learning papers, which helped me get an idea about the various venues. I'm now doing research in applying Machine Learning to malware. Maybe KDD or JMLR would be ok for a really good paper on application, but I'm feeling daunted on learning about the venues for my new sub-discipline. When I read ML stuff on my own there was no time constraint, but now that I'm preparing stuff to submit I'm feeling a bit intimidated.

• Workshops / Conferences / Journals. I've gotten some mixed feedback on this one. One of my coworkers talked about how his advisors plan was: get initial results, submit to workshop. Improve results, submit follow up to conference. Finish the work and make it conclusive, submit to journal. My advisor is a bit happy go lucky about it. If it's long, submit to a journal, if it's short, to a conference - and workshops just kinda whenever? Do you tend to write work with the thought in mind that "I'm going to submit this to a journal / conference"?

• Working to specific venues: Do people tend to start work with a particular destination in mind? My gut reaction was to do the work and find it a home when done, and adjust the details of what I discuss toward the interests of the venue. Though it seems some have a preference to start work with a destination in mind and adjust their experiments / work toward what that destination likes.

• Industry conferences? My situation is a little odd since I'm doing my PhD part time while working full time. I'm sure my work would love something submitted to Strata as a talk, but does that have any bearing on my PhD? Would submitting a talk to something that's really higher level like that impede submitting finished work to a conference/journal?