Two weeks ago I’ve attended the 360iDev conference in Denver. This year was my second year that I attended 360iDev.

For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s an iOS conference focusing on everything related to iOS Development. The conference lasts four days and usually has at least 3-4 different topics going at the same time so that everyone can find a topic they like at any given time. The topics can be grouped into either iOS, technical or business topics. That might sound a bit like every other conference, but I haven’t told you the best part yet: 360iDev’s community!

As 360iDev originated as an indie conference and still understands itself as such, it attracts a unique set of people that are happy to connect and exchange. It’s also limited to somewhere between 300-400 people, which is still a big group but not huge like WWDC or some other big conferences. This makes it a great place for anyone that enjoy quality over quantity and gives you a better chance to connect with fellow devs.

This year was not different in that perspective. The community once more helped to make this 4 great days.

There were some great talks that I loved for so many reasons, two of them were Jost Micheals general session on Effective Strategies for Selling Out as well as Curtis Herbert’s Challenging our Assumptions to Succeed in the App Store.

But there was also something else this year that was special to me: It was my first year speaking at 360iDev!!

My talk was titled On The Shoulder Of Giants: How To Properly Mentor A Junior Developer. (If you ever come across the video of my talk, I want to mention that this isn’t my regular voice, but rather some problem they had with the audio recording) It was a business talk trying to shed light on the receiving end of a mentoring relationship - A topic that’s important to me, to which I started collecting thoughts and notes a bit over 7 years ago.

The journey it took to get this idea to a finished talk will soon be subject of a different post, there were so many things that seemed easy but turned out to be difficult (Dilbert Comics Licensing, Talk Sponsoring, Etc.) Yet, overcoming all these struggles was totally worth it. The audience seemed to like my talk and furthermore gave me a rating of 4.21 on a scale from 1-5 - not too bad for my first conference talk in a foreign language.

I have to say, it was a great experience speaking at 360iDev and I’m looking forward to more speaking proposals and hopefully more speaking gigs.

It was great seeing everyone in the business again and I hope to see you next year!

Thanks to everyone that attended my talk and gave me feedback! It meant a lot to me. Keep rockin’