Xamarin Evolve 2013 – Day 1

Hello from Austin, TX! So today was day 1 of the Xamarin Evolve conference. What a day! Marcel (@marcelv) and I flew in on Saturday and we arrived at the hotel late in the evening, so there was no time to check out downtown Austin, famous for its live music scene. It’s obvious as soon as you arrive on Austin airport.

After a good night’s sleep, we went down to the conference area in the Hilton hotel to register and have a nice breakfast. Immediately, the great attention to detail Xamarin put into organising Evolve was apparent. Have a look at the conference badge:

The name badge also serves as a booklet containing the conference schedule and speaker information. The emphasis on the first name (printed in big bold letters) makes it personal and informal.

Next, the names of the conference rooms… They were all named after scientists related to Evolution (get it… Evolve) or monkeys. Illustrious people like Darwin, Dawkins, Gould, Goodall, Fossey, etcetera.

Things that make you feel that a lot of thought and attention to detail went into this conference. Xamarin can be proud of this.

We were also proud to see Info Support listed on the banner as a Silver Sponsor. 🙂

The welcome and keynote by Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman was nice. He told us how they were completely overwhelmed by the interest in Evolve. At first they anticipated around 250 people, but it soon went up to 400, and later on sold out at 600 people! Xamarin even had to change the venue and date in order to fit in all these people. A testament of Xamarin’s success and community passion for their products!

Passion is actually what describes Xamarin and Evolve best. All 70 (!) Xamarin employees are present at the conference, walking around, always available for a quick talk or questions, and all of them radiate passion for their job. The same with the participants. Mobile is fun. I’m confident that this vibe will stay during the remaining three days.

It was also great to meet and greet the Xamarin leaders. Nat, Miguel, Stephanie, all taking time to talk to everyone and eager to work together with their partners and the developer community.

This first day was dedicated to the Xamarin training. We did the Advanced track. After some technical difficulties – Wifi at a conference always sucks – we covered Notifications, Touch, Android Fragments, Animations and Graphics in iOS and Android. The training material is quite nice, as are the demo apps.

All day, we were very well taken care of in terms of food and drinks. Austin is a nice place for a foodie 🙂 To celebrate our first day at Evolve, we were all invited to Stubb’s Bar-B-Q restaurant, where we enjoyed a nice BBQ… pulled pork, beef briskett, cole slaw, nachos and quacamole, you name it. All that in a nice atmosphere and accompanied with a couple of beers. Oh and great weather!

Tomorrow it’s day 2 of the Advanced training. Looking forward to that. Tuesday and Wednesday are conference days, and then it’s our turn to talk about mobile development with Xamarin. See you at our sessions?

Tuesday, 2.30PM: Creating a Uniform Login for Apps
Wednesday, 1.30PM: Sharing up to 80% Code for iOS, Android and Windows