Last week, I flew to Alexandria, Virginia to attend RWDevCon, a tutorial conference. Unlike most other tech events, this conference is fully interactive. Before the conference begins, there’s an optional day where you can choose from two different all-day workshops on a single topic. During the conference, aside from the opening and closing remarks and some short inspirational talks, every single session is a hands-on tutorial. Lunch is served buffet-style and everyone sits at large round tables. Each table is set up with casual card games and has at least one RayWenderlich.com team member who teaches the game to everyone else. During the conference party on Friday evening, James Dempsey hosted a game show where attendees were invited to answer trivia questions about Apple development and products. From beginning to end, this conference is both structured and playful, and makes an effort to be inviting to newcomers.

What drew me to RWDevCon was the hands-on nature of these tutorial sessions. I’ve attended different types of tech conferences in the past few years, including PyCon, CocoaConf, and Strange Loop, and I’ve had great experiences at a lot of them. However, I’ve found that some talks seem to suffer from being constrained to ~40 minutes. Many talks that include live coding demonstrations don’t work well for me because I have trouble following along with snippets of code on a far-away screen without enough project context. It’s important to know how you personally learn, but there are some things that hold true in general about learning methods: when you passively receive information, whether it’s written or spoken, you retain less than when you put that information into practice. My hope was that RWDevCon’s format would address both of those concerns. I wrote this post on my flight home, so it’s too early to say for sure how much I’ll retain, but right now I’m pretty happy with how the conference went.

Before the conference, I was concerned that my lack of language fluency would pose a problem. The tutorials were presented in Swift, required lots of typing, and covered some advanced subjects. I originally learned how to develop iOS apps in Objective-C and I still use it exclusively at work. I can read Swift well enough to translate Stack Overflow answers into my own code base, but I wasn’t confident that I could write it, so I was worried about whether I was going to be able to keep up. Fortunately, I’m a fast touch typist, I’ve been using Xcode and Cocoa / Cocoa Touch for years, and I’ve previously learned about concepts like closures and optionals in other languages. However, I did occasionally create syntax errors that I couldn’t immediately fix. This posed a problem during the faster-moving sessions because I was distracted from listening to the next part and I could no longer run my project to test things out. My solution was to keep both the starter project and the final project open during the demo. That way, if I couldn’t figure out the problem in a few seconds, I could copy and paste the relevant five lines and get myself unstuck.

Two tutorials in particular stood out to me:

Reconstructing Popular iOS Animations by Caroline Begbie
I think this session will end up being the most applicable to my day job. My app could really use more animations, so I was glad to see a substantial amount of content both in the live portion and in the PDF lab to complete afterwards. I also loved that Caroline provided ample context for her examples because as a user, I find gratuitous animations very frustrating, and it was helpful to understand how Tinder and Snapchat’s animations convey information to the user.

Swift Playgrounds in Depth by Jawwad Ahmad
This is the session I’m planning on revisiting first. I want to teach myself more Swift in little chunks of time at home and this looks like a great way to start. I’m not convinced that I’d use things like file literals in production code, but it looks really cool for prototyping and exploration. This tutorial was especially good at minimizing the amount of boilerplate code that we had to type in ourselves while delivering a lot of value.

As with any conference, there were a few things I wish I’d done differently:

Prepare a detailed schedule. The organizers sent out a lot of materials in the week leading up to the conference. I wish I’d reviewed the schedule and made a plan of which tutorials I wanted to attend. The important part wouldn’t be to adhere strictly to those decisions; it’s to do the work of understanding what each session is really about. It would also have forced me to contemplate what I wanted to get out of the conference. For example, did I want exposure to tricky new ideas, or would I rather practice something I partly understood in order to solidify my understanding?

Plan some quality alone time. I planned some fun breaks by meeting up with local friends in the evenings for dinner. However, as much as I enjoy talking to people, I also really love my alone time. I wish I’d planned some sit-down restaurant meals or walks around the neighborhood to let my thoughts simply wander. In addition, the ergonomics of conference tables and chairs aren’t great for typing on a MacBook Air, and my wrists and eyes could have used some rest.

An observation on diversity: compared to the places where I’ve personally worked, my gut sense from looking around the room was that gender diversity was poor and age diversity was slightly better than average. Racial diversity seemed about on par. I was shocked to overhear someone say that “There are a lot more ladies here this year.” I realize that my experiences at large companies in San Francisco may not be typical, but I wanted to note my reaction anyway.

Overall, my experience at RWDevCon was very positive. I’m glad that I was able to attend and I feel like I gained a lot from it, both in terms of the technical material covered and the many ad hoc conversations with folks from other places.