RWDevCon 2018 Post-Mortem

What Could Be Improved

As with anything, there are always some things you can improve. Here are the top three suggestions:

1) Slow down and/or more time

Let me tell you – giving live tutorials is tough! Finding the right balance between going into enough depth, while not going too fast for folks, is something we keep working on each year.

This year, we added more time for each tutorial and replaced the challenge with another demo, and that seemed to be well received. However, many people still reported some tutorials went a bit too fast to follow along with, and recommended slowing down and adding some more time.

We have some ideas on how to improve that next year, including having a room host watching students and stopping the speaker if things go too fast, and possibly adding more time for tutorials.

2) No auto-complete

Another very common piece of feedback is that we should disable autocomplete when giving our demos, as sometimes autocomplete covers what the instructor is typing and is a little distracting.

We’ll look into disabling that next year. As a side benefit, it should make the demos go at a bit slower of a pace! :]

3) One more day?

There seems to be quite a bit of interest in an additional day of the conference. I must admit this is tempting, as this would make it easier to have room to add more time for tutorials, and avoid overlapping events (like Open Spaces occurring at the same time as the Hackathon).

Logistics-wise, we’re still trying to figure out if or how to make this happen. Additional days bring additional costs, and we’re also trying to figure out how we can bring more Android content into the mix, since our site is now about Android development too!

Where to Go From Here?

Want to know when the next RWDevCon will be?

We will email everyone who is on our conference newsletter first before we announce the event publicly. If you’d like to be notified if/when tickets become available, sign up here.

If you didn’t get to attend this year, don’t worry – we’ll be releasing the RWDevCon 2018 Vault soon! This is a massive vault of tutorial videos from the conference: 24+ hours of video tutorials, plus the 500+ page conference book.

Thanks again for everyone who helped make the fourth annual RWDevCon a success – speakers, attendees, sponsors and more!