Inert Detritus The Internet's dust bunnies

C4[1] Wrap

Today marked the end of the C4[1] con­fer­ence in down­town Chica­go. The talks giv­en Fri­day night, Sat­ur­day, and Sun­day ranged from the hilar­i­ous, with Wil Ship­ley’s talk on hype and prod­uct releas­es, to the sur­pris­ing, with the announce­ment of Nu, a Lisp imple­men­ta­tion for Obj‑C, to the impres­sive, with an Iron Coder Live hack for the iPhone by the Aspes­lagh broth­ers that sup­port­ed two-way video chat over the AT&T network.

C4[1] had been in the works since Johnathan Rentzsch threw C4 (now known as C4[0]) in Octo­ber 2006. C4[0] was a great suc­cess, fill­ing a need for small con­fer­ences after the death of MacHack/ADHOC. When C4[1] was announced in April, and reg­is­tra­tion opened in May, I reg­is­tered immediately.

C4[1] was a chance for me to meet the devel­op­ers that I’ve fol­lowed via Twit­ter and RSS, the devel­op­ers whose prod­ucts I use day in and day out. But more than that, I got to talk to a large num­ber of devs who haven’t yet made the jump to full-time inde­pen­dence. I asked them about what they were work­ing on, what was hold­ing them back, and where they saw them­selves going in the near future. Many were at C4[1] for the same rea­son as me: they want­ed to find out how oth­er peo­ple had done it; they want­ed to net­work with oth­er devel­op­ers; they want­ed to learn what every­one else was work­ing on.

C4[1] was worth the mon­ey I spent on it, although in hind­sight (in the form of the hotel bill), I’d con­sid­er stay­ing at the Chica­go hos­tel in the Loop if I came again. I love to help under­write the con­fer­ence, but not as a col­lege stu­dent who did­n’t get a schol­ar­ship to come. In total, I spent about 1200 dol­lars to fly out, stay at Chica­go City Cen­tre hotel, and pay the $512 for the con­fer­ence itself.

More valu­able than any­thing I got from the talks was the moti­va­tion, inspi­ra­tion, and impres­sive­ness of know­ing that oth­er peo­ple have been here before me and been suc­cess­ful. I’m going to fit in Cocoa devel­op­ment when­ev­er I can dur­ing this upcom­ing school year. I man­aged to hack through most of Hil­le­gass’s book this past spring, but ran out of steam over the sum­mer. This fall, I’m hop­ing to read Stephen Kochan’s Pro­gram­ming in Objective‑C and get more com­fort­able with the language.