I am traveling to CocoaConf Las Vegas tomorrow. This is my second CocoaConf of the “season.” The first CocoaConf of the season was in Columbus, OH.

Since I am a member of Eric Knapp’s gang of iOS disciples, I was able to car pool with some of the other members of that group. On the way home, one guy in the car asked me if I had spoken to a certain person at the conference. I had not. I didn’t know this person.

I was told that this guy really wanted to talk to me but he was intimidated by me because I was speaking at the conference.

This made me feel really bad.

“No, I never thought about working at Apple. Why are you asking?”

I am in this weird transitory state at the moment. When I first started going to conferences I really wanted to meet all the speakers, so I would aggressively and strategically make sure I was sitting next to them for meals. I made a lot of great friends and found a lot of advocates for myself this way. I would not be where I am today if I had not done that.

Now that I am a speaker, I don’t really know how to act. I don’t want to aggressively sit next to all my fellow “speakers” and make people feel bad because somehow we are an exclusive group of people because we really aren’t.

I feel bad about CocoaConf Columbus because I basically spent the entire trip hanging out with Chris Adamson. He’s my friend and coauthor, but I felt like I really should have made an effort to meet other people. It was kind of hard for me because I had no opening line to start a conversation with a stranger. That was one great thing about talking to speakers at programming conferences. There was a way to start a conversation. You could read their bio and ask about their job. You could ask them about their talk. I used to tweet people during their talks and come up to them later and explain who I was.

I am asking anyone who wants to meet me at a programming conference to please just come up and say hi to me. Tweet at me so when you introduce yourself I have an idea about who you are. Believe it or not, I am a somewhat socially awkward person and it is a lot easier for me to talk to people if I have some idea about what to talk about.

Unless a person is really putting off “stay the heck away from me” vibes, most of us are really approachable. We like to geek out about technology. That’s why we are here talking about it. If you want to geek out with us, just pull up a chair and say hi.

Hope to see a few people do this in Las Vegas. Looking forward to meeting you.