I speak at a lot of conferences. I have spoken at around ten conferences a year since 2014. That’s a lot of conferences. I have had some not so great experiences and a few really awesome ones, and the awesome ones are the ones I want to talk about in this blog post.

The best conferences I have attended over the last twelve months were RWDevCon and CocoaLove. Both of these conferences went above and beyond to deliver a unique conference experience.

CocoaLove is in Philadelphia and really embraces the City of Brotherly Love vibe. Curtis and his team make sure the food at the conference is local, including an entire lunch activity around getting authentic Philly cheesesteaks.

RWDevCon has the advantage of name recognition because of the years of amazing tutorials that Ray’s team has put out. CocoaLove does not.

Another great conference that might not make it to its third year is a newcomer, Indie DevStock. Indie DevStock is being run by my friend Tammy Coron, a fellow Ray Wenderlich tutorial team member. She talked to me about running the conference with her, but I told her I was too busy. I was mostly too cowardly to actually stick my neck out and try to run my own conference. Tammy has bigger balls than I do and is making a go of it.

Both CocoaLove and Indie DevStock are in regions of the country that don’t see a lot of conferences. CocoaLove is in the Northeast and Indie DevStock is in the South.

Every week on Twitter I see people bitch and moan about the lack of diversity in tech. Everyone wonders what we can do about it. CocoaLove made a concerted effort to have a diverse lineup. Indie DevStock is run by a woman and 67% of their lineup is underrepresented persons in tech.

Both Curtis and Tammy have lovingly put a great deal of work into making their conferences special and unique experiences. People don’t run conferences to make money. These are labors of love. It’s really easy at a certain point to just kind of go, fuck it, and deliver a generic conference experience. We’ve all had our fair share of those. Both Curtis and Tammy really got creative and tried to set their conferences apart from everyone else.

Every year I hear of some really cool and special conference that has its last year because it’s just too difficult for the organizer to run it anymore. NSConf. Second Conf. C4. NSScotland. Everyone bemoans the loss of these conferences.

There are a lot of these conferences that I have been greatly disappointed in missing out on. I’m sure other people are disappointed as well.

I want to suggest that if you live in any area East of the Mississippi you strongly consider attending either CocoaLove or Indie DevStock. I am attending both (and only speaking at one.) Nashville is a ten-hour drive from Madison and Philly is thirteen hours. Supposedly I will be able to bring my beloved pug Delia to Indie DevStock. It’s wonderful to have a few conferences that are within driving distance from me where I don’t have to buy a plane ticket and deal with all the shenanigans I have dealt with this year.

You can use the code “HELLO” to get a discount on a ticket to Indie DevStock.

I know the face of iOS development is changing. We’re growing and evolving and becoming more corporate. I do hope that even with all the growth of the iOS community we don’t forget our funky, eclectic roots. The unique conference experiences that we have are in danger and it’s important for us to support them.

Anyway, I suck at selling things. There’s a reason I became a programmer and not a sales person. I want to help spread the word about these conferences and try to convince people to come so that iOS development doesn’t become just like everything else. Support indie development and diverse voices in tech!!