Tuesday August 16, 2011

✦ After CocoaConf 2011

I’m finally catching up after CocoaConf. For a first time effort, I was impressed with how well they pulled it off. Logistically trim, good WiFi (!), good food, and a great set of speakers.

I’m honored to be a member of that set. For those who came to my talks looking for slides, here they are in all their PDF exported glory.

UI Automation
MacRuby

And remember, the code and examples I used in the demo during my UI Automation talk come from my ongoing series.

I’ve never been to a conference that made such a big deal about soliciting feedback on the sessions. They wandered around every room handing out forms and pens while you were sitting in your seat waiting for each session to start. And every form you turned in gave you another ticket for a raffle. That makes for pretty low friction of participation. I walked away with a larger-than-expected stack of forms. Yeah, there were some unhelpful comments here and there, but it’s feedback nonetheless. I filtered it out and found it useful.

My favorite talk was Mark Dalrymple’s “Thoughts About Debugging”. It was a nice collection of wisdom gleaned from his life as a technical sleuth. Race conditions, untraceable third party libraries, spaghetti; I’m a sucker for well delivered anecdotes.

If you hear of CocoaConf coming to an area near you, check it out. They take it seriously.