Great talks and coffee at AltConf

eaf1ca963806147642c96f7463349f83Lots of really great stuff at AltConf this year. I wasn’t lucky enough to get a raffled badge for WWDC, but I’m very glad I was still able to come and hang out at AltConf and meet some new people. Already, this week has been a huge inspiration to get Loose Leaf done and shipped. Being surrounded by folks who are churning on really cool projects rubs off on you. This year, AltConf is hosting its lab sessions at its 2nd location, and it’s been great to spend some time each afternoon coding hard and combing through all the Apple announcements in a crowded room of other folks doing the same thing: like we’re all racing to know all the things.

Besides coding and the labs, I’ve really enjoyed the talks. Two in particular I’ll link to here, but all of the ones I’ve been to have been awesome. Sofia Dvoynos gave a great talk about marketing apps. All the usual suspects were mentioned: planning, email campaigns, keywords, etc, but what set this apart and really helped me out was the concrete examples and references to help get all that done. Everyone knows competitive analysis is important, but she was good enough to link to the xls she uses to research and compare – awesome stuff. Watch her talk below:

Sofia Dvoynos: From Zero to Marketing in 7 days

Also great was Carla White’s inspirational talk. She gave a refreshing talk about how to truly make your app better, and that’s to make sure to take time for the things that matter: being purposefully and specifically grateful of others and giving back however you can. It’s more than I’ll summarize in a small paragraph, please do take the ~30m and watch it.

Outside the conference, I’ve also made some good headway on a personal goal: drink as much good coffee as I can! So far I’ve visited Chrome, Blue Bottle, and Workshop Cafe, and I expect to visit many more shops throughout the week. All in all a fun week! I highly recommend watching the AltConf speakers presentations here: http://www.altconf.com/speakers/ – lots of good stuff going on.