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
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.