RWDevCon with Ray Wenderlich and John Wilker – Podcast S03 E04

Welcome back to season 3 of the raywenderlich.com podcast!
In this episode, find out what happened at our RWDevCon Tutorial Conference with myself and John Wilker!
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Transcript
Mic: We’re here in the capital at the Liaison Capitol Hill, where RWDevCon just finished. We’re going to be joined by Ray and John Wilker, shortly. John Wilker is the organizer of 360iDev and has helped Ray put on RWDevCon. Before we introduce those guys into the conversation, I want to get your opinion. I know, obviously, Ray’s staring at you now and you also work for Ray, so putting Ray out of the picture, turn around if you need to, genuine impressions?
Jake: It was great. This was the first conference I’ve been a speaker at. I’ve been to just a handful of other conferences. I’ve been to a 360 a couple years back. I had a really good experience both as an attendee, just talking to other people and meeting people and talking about the topics of the conference. As a speaker, it was a really good experience. Ray put us all through our paces as speakers. He had a specific structure we should follow to prepare and it really helped me. I certainly would not have put the same amount of time and effort into it without some guidance, and just because I’d never done it before I didn’t know what to expect.
When I finally got up I was nervous but I felt prepared and I got a lot of good feedback on my session. I was pleased with my own performance and I had a great experience, so how about you? What was your impression? You’d spoken before, right?
Mic: I’ve only spoken once but this was a very different experience, because usually, in my experience with other conferences, the organizer will put out a call for talks, people will respond with ideas and that will be, once you’re accepted, that will be the last year hear from the organizer, until the day you turn up.
Whereas anybody that knows Ray and works for Ray, that was never going to be the case for RWDevCon. I think we had 2 to 2-1/2 months of really hardcore preparation to get ready for the conference but then I think that was evident in a lot of the feedback from talking personally to attendees and other raywenderlich.com team members was that that really increased the quality.
When you’re getting that kind of feedback it makes you feel better and gives you more confidence because my two sessions were the last two on the second day, so I had that huge buildup, then the more people were talking to me and giving me this really good feedback and knowing that all the effort was worth it, then yeah. Actually when I woke up yesterday morning I was excited not nervous, which is really unusual for me. Yeah, I really enjoyed the whole experience.
Jake: During the buildup in the amount of work, when I committed to this I didn’t realize and I thought I don’t know if I’m going to do this again. After I spoke and got the feedback, I thought I should speak more, this was great.
Mic: It’s definitely worth it, I think. I’ve learned a lot, but also in the run up to all this when we were … It’s hard to explain for those that weren’t involved in the speaker process to know just how much work has gone into this. We also got some training on how to be a better speaker, and I think putting the conference to one side, you’re still taking a lot that we all got a lot from that.
Jake: Yes.
Mic: Yeah, really, I’d definitely do it again. Yeah. Definitely got the confidence now to do it again. I think that’s probably a good time to introduce both Ray and John into the conversation. Guys, thanks for joining us.
John: My pleasure.