So last month I had the pleasure of attending 360iDev in Denver, Colorado. Overall, this was a very good conference. As always, I learned so much from my fellow developers.
Positives
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The location is great. Denver itself is easier to get to (for me) than the West Coast. And the location of the hotel along the pedestrian mall was a great choice.
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One of the big themes I noticed this year was “offline” is something you should plan for if at all possible (see the conference wifi issues). Several panels I attended on this were outstanding. I’m really thinking hard about this now in my apps.
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Kyle Richter’s talk “The Last Job” was just the type of thing I like to see in a conference as a change of pace. A great talk touching on some sci-fi topics that really make you think about the future.
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There were several very good panels on animation and the impact they have on your apps. Facebook’s Pop animations got a lot of talk. It really got me to think hard about the user experience.
Negatives
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Having the Hard Rock Cafe as the official lunch venue was sub-optimal. After looking in on the first day, I completely abandoned that idea. There’s everything you can imagine on the mall outside, and the food truck rally Tuesday was great.
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I know conference wifi is hard. I get it. But the wifi was completely unusable for most of the week. People were resorting to passing around thumb drives to get data around. In some rooms, I could maybe tether. In other rooms I could sometimes get the hotel’s guest network wifi. But for most of the week bandwidth was hard to find.