NSSpain 2013

It’s September 24th. iOS devs are sad. Very sad. All of them had to leave Logroño after attending the very first Cocoa conference organized in Spanish province La Rioja, the land of vine and amazing food.

tl;dr

• very personal and friendly organizers
• picked up on the airport by Luis
• hotel already booked for speakers (how awesome is that!)
• eating tapas and partying w/ organizers every day, we did a marathon!
• lots of great devs seen around

La Rioja

It’s a province somewhere between Bilbao and Madrid I’d say, with Logroño as the capital. These guys know how to make vine and have some unique eating habits. We haven’t eaten a meal in a restaurant, they took us instead to ₅ food bars each lunch. Apparently this is known as doing tapas.

To give you a preview of how these bars look like compared to restaurants, here’s Aral, Orta, Luis, Fabio (behind the camera) and me.

How it all started

The first night we’ve had a speakers dinner, organized at home at some friend of Luis. It all started nice and neat, until we’ve started drinking local stuff, heavily. To give you another preview of how this might look like..

On the picture: majority from the first pic, with Fernando, Borja, Luis, Juan, Jesus and Diego taking photo.

The loop

I won’t be talking about each day separately, because they all looked like:

great_taks();
what_you_do_in_logrono();

Now you’re probably thinking.. what’s the implementation of what_you_do_in_logrono()?

void what_you_do_in_logrono() {
    for (int days = 0; days < 7; days++) {
        eat();
        drink();
        eat();
        drink();
        eat();
        drink();

        // enough eating
        drink();
        drink();
        drink();
    }
}

Talks

There was lots of interesting talks, there was even the whole objc.io team, and some peeps from CocoaPods core team. Hopefully there’ll be a shared gallery that I’ll include here once it’s created.

As you may have guessed, among the other speakers, I’ve given a talk as well. Actually, there was a talk on ObjectiveSugar & ObjectiveRecord (slides) and a workshop on behavior - driven testing using Kiwi.

The talk could have gone better, but I’m pretty satisfied with the workshop. This is also the first time I’ve tried using After Talk, a micro app for collecting feedback un-intrusively after you give a talk.

Thanks everyone who left feedback, definitely a good pointer for improving the next workshop. Here’s what people said.

GIFs

Our Artsyst and gentleman @orta is really into making GIFs. He already has an impressive collection, but we made some more. You can check the whole collection out here.

After the conference

There was a big festival in Logroño right after the conference (what a coincidence!). So I’ll cut out the writing, and call the function again:

what_you_do_in_logrono();

To conclude

As this was their first attempt, Borja and Luis deserve a big online high - five from everybody for organizing such a thing in only 3 months.

This might become a way bigger event starting from the next year. It was nice meeting you, everyone.