Hello from RWDevCon!
Today we are running RWDevCon: The Tutorial Conference – check out some pictures and find out how it’s going so far! By Ray Wenderlich.
Today the team and I are in Washington DC running RWDevCon: The Tutorial Conference.
This is our first time ever running this conference. Our goal is to create a conference that’s focused on interactive, hands-on tutorials, highly coordinated as a team – along with inspiration and friendship.
The conference sold out within about a month, and we have 180 attendees from across the world – countries like Finland, Germany, Iceland, Serbia, and more.
The conference is going great so far, so we thought it would be fun to post a quick status update and some pictures of the conference!
Opening Remarks
This morning, Vicki and I kicked off the conference with a discussion on Teamwork.
This is a really important topic to me, because everything this site has accomplished over the past five years is a direct result of working together as a team, and I feel incredibly lucky to be a part of such a great group of developers.
Hands-On Tutorials
After the opening remarks, we moved onto hands-on tutorials.
Each tutorial at RWDevCon is split into five parts:
- Opening (5 minutes). Get a birds-eye overview of the topic.
- Hands-on demo (30 minutes). Code along with the speaker in a live demo.
- Lab (15 minutes). Follow a step-by-step tutorial to learn a bit more.
- Challenge (15 minutes). See if you can do it on your own.
- Conclusion (3 minutes). Wrap up and get ready for the next tutorial.
We have tutorials on Auto Layout, Adaptive Layout, WatchKit, App Architecture, Scene Kit, and more – you can see the full schedule for more details.
Friendship
To me, the most important part of any conference is the people – so we want to do all we can to help people meet each other, have fun, and make friends.
Last night, we had an opening reception for the conference where we got to make some initial introductions to attendees.
Today, we had a nice lunch and a board game tournament!
This evening, we’re going to have a party at Penn Social, for a fun evening of food, games, and beer! :]
Inspiration
After a hard-days work on tutorials, we will be moving to “inspiration talks.”
Today, we’ll be having talks on “Craftmanship”, “Identity”, “Commitment”, and more.
A slide from Vicki’s talk on Identity.
These are short 18-minute talks on topics designed to share some battle-won advice, or challenge you to try something new or embark on a new path you might not have thought about otherwise.
What about Recording?
A common question I get about RWDevCon is “Are you recording these talks?”
We will be recording inspiration talks – those will translate well to video, and we will release them for free on the site after the conference.
However, will not be recording the tutorials because they are really designed for an in-person hands-on experience and wouldn’t translate well to video.
Just like your app has one format for an iPhone and another for an iPad, we feel that in-person tutorials lead to one way of doing things, and online video tutorials lead to another way of doing things, and want to make sure we do the right thing for each format.
So you will see some of the same ideas from this conference in the video tutorial section on our site, but it will likely be done in a different format :]
Where To Go From Here?
That’s it for this status update – just wanted to let you see how things were going so far.
I’ll probably put out another post next week with a post-mortem on the entire experience. In the meantime, if you want see more RWDevCon pictures and news, check out our RWDevCon twitter account!
Also, if you didn’t make it this year, we hope to see you at another RWDevCon in the future! Be sure to sign up to our mailing list if you want to be notified if/when it runs again.
Anyway, just wanted to say hi and let you all know how it’s going so far – talk more later!