Month: January 2018

If you’re looking for a conference that’s mostly iOS development tutorials, a couple of Android development tutorials, and a few inspirational presentations to help you make the most of those tutorials, you’ll want to attend “The Tutorial Conference”: RWDevCon 2018!

RWDevCon is put together by the people who put together RayWenderlich.com, the site for mobile developers. It got its start as an iOS developer site, but has since expanded to cover macOS and Android development, and from XCode only to also cover Android Developer Studio and Unity. I cut my iOS developer teeth by learning from RayWenderlich.com, and like the site so much that I joined their team of authors. Even though I run an iOS meetup here in Tampa, I’m on their Android team, because I like a challenge.

I’m also presenting at RWDevCon — a full-afternoon workshop on ARKit and a shorter “Intro to ARKit” tutorial. It’s going to be informative and entertaining, and you’ll walk away with not just the skills to write your own ARKit apps, but possibly a whole lot of app ideas.

RWDevCon takes place at the Westin Alexandria Hotel in Alexandria, Virginia. It has sold out three years in a row, so if you want to attend, the time to register is now. Here are the rates:

• Conference only: $999
• Conference + pre-conference workshops: $1,499
• Companion ticket (gets your significant other or friend into the after-parties): $49

If you want to get better at mobile development and meet some of its brightest lights (and hey, you can meet me too), check out RWDevCon, or better yet, attend!

Tonight’s Tampa Bay UX Group meetup will be a panel discussion about the expectations for and the future of user experience in 2018, and in a little bit of synchronicity, we’ve just had a major missile alert thanks in part to a poorly-designed user interface in which the selections for a missile alert drill and the real thing differed by a single word. This should make for an especially interesting discussion.

See this and others at the Laws of UX site.

I should run a betting pool on what time the first mention of the Law of Proximity (objects that are near, or proximate to each other, tend to be grouped together) will get mentioned when the Hawaii incident gets discussed.

I’ll be at tonight’s Tampa Bay UX Group meetup, and if you’re in the Tampa Bay area, you should be too! It takes place tonight at the offices of 352 Inc (5100 W Kennedy Blvd, Suite 352, Tampa) from 6:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.. Please note that the building locks its doors at 6:30, so arrive before then!

I’ll close with this relevant tweet:

When @slack is better than your missile defence warning system… pic.twitter.com/BGAUQppA5N

— Jon Wade (@asjonish) January 15, 2018

…is the one given by Anders Brownworth, the Chief Evangelist at Circle and co-host of the podcast The Critical Path with Horace “asymco” Dediu. In the space of 17 minutes and 50 seconds, his explainer video (shown below), walks you through hashes, which get used in blocks, which are assembled into a blockchain, which is then distributed, after which he talks about tokens and coinbases.

Best of all, you don’t have to be a programmer to “get” it. You’ll need to be able to wrap your head around an abstract concept or two, but that’s about it. If you feel comfy navigating your way around a spreadsheet, Brownworth’s video will have you understanding the general inner workings of cryptocurrencies over your lunch break:

You can even play with the demonstrations that Brownworth uses in the video — they’re all on his site, and he’s even posted the code to GitHub!

Once you’ve watched the video above, you should watch his latest one, in which he explains public and private keys, how they’re used to electronically “sign” data, and how they fit with blockchains: