Of course the big news yesterday was Apple’s announcement of WWDC 2012 and then it’s subsequent record sellout in a little under 2 hours. I was fortuitous enough to have the means and opportunity to secure a ticket for myself, but many developers were not.
Fortunately for those wishing to participate in the technical instruction and peer networking of an iOS/Mac tech conference, there are a number of excellent indie conferences. These conferences have the benefits of being both more intimate (i.e. easier to network) and more affordable than WWDC while still having great technical content. Two excellent American conferences are CocoaConf (at which I will be speaking in June), a roaming conference that occurs in various underserved (in the technical conference sense) cities, and 360iDev which has now settled in beautiful Denver, CO every September. Scott McAlister has compiled a list of 2012 iOS tech conferences on his blog here.
So if you crave that conference fix but didn’t get a ticket to WWDC this year (or even if you did), don’t offer to legally change your name, just go attend one of the many outstanding indie conferences instead.
