I loved my first programming conference. Snow*Mobile 2013 was one of the best experiences I have had for a while. As Eric the iOS teacher says, “I found my people”. I was totally bummed when the conference was over because there wasn’t going to be another one until UXMad happens this summer.

Until I discovered Cocoa Conf. There is another conference happening in Chicago March 7-9, 2013. This one is going to be super cool because this is going to be 100% Apple programming. Snow*Mobile was awesome, but there was a lot of presentations about Android and HTML5 among other things because it was about mobile development, not iOS programming.

I have discovered some things I wish I had known before Snow*Mobile that I can now implement before Cocoa Conf:

– Have business cards! I am at the conference to meet people and connect. It is a little unprofessional to not have a card to hand someone with your information on it. I have ordered business cards with my professional info on them. They should be here on time. I paid for the faster shipping.

– Have a blog. I mentioned in my first post, I figured out after the conference that I should have had a blog and talked about the conference in it (I give a shout out to Ray Hightower for giving me this idea). So I now have a blog.

– Twitter can be useful. If you are following a speaker and you tweet them about their talk, that gives you an intro so that they know who you are. That way you are not some random person on Twitter making stupid comments on things.

I am going for the conference and I am also attending the iOS game workshop the day before the conference begins.

I am super excited to see Chris Adamson talk about Core Audio. One of my long-term goals is to learn Core Audio and OpenGL. I don’t think I am at the level where I can do that yet, but it is out there on the horizon.

I am sure there will be lots of other cool people there that I am not familiar with whom I look forward to meeting.

If anyone reading this post is going to be there, drop me a comment or tweet me @redqueencoder and I’ll keep an eye out for you. Any advice on whose talk to see is appreciated. There are so many choices that it is a little overwhelming.