RWDevCon 2017 Post-Mortem

What Could Be Improved

As with anything, there are always some things you can improve. Here are the top 3 suggestions:

1) Less Tutorials, More Time

The most common piece of feedback I got from attendees is that they wished we would have a few less tutorials, but more time on each tutorial so we could go a little bit deeper.

So next year, we’re considering going down from 24 tutorials to 18 tutorials, but with more depth on each tutorial.

2) Rethink Labs

After each tutorial this year, we offered a lab where the speaker would go to another room to answer questions or talk about their subject.

A lot of attendees liked this idea, but didn’t like having to miss a tutorial to go to the labs. So next year, we’d like to find a way to do this (or something similar, like guided breakfast or lunch discussions) that doesn’t cause people to have to miss tutorial time.

3) More Pacing Tweaks

Pacing is one of the biggest challenges with hands-on tutorials, as some people are more advanced than others, some people are faster typers than others, etc. Getting it “just right” is quite difficult!

Although I think we made some improvements this year, I think we can still do better here. A lot of attendees had some good ideas that we intend to investigate to improve further in this area.

Where To Go From Here?

For everyone asking – yes, we are planning on having a RWDevCon 2018 next year!

The conference has sold out for three years in a row now, so you won’t want to miss your chance at getting a ticket.

We will email everyone who is on our conference newsletter first before we announce the event publicly. If you’d like to be notified if/when tickets become available, sign up here.

The RWDevCon 2017 Vault

If you didn’t get to attend, definitely check out our massive vault of tutorial videos from the conference – 24+ hours of video tutorials, plus a 450+ page conference book.

Thanks again for everyone who helped make the third annual RWDevCon a success!