Re: BigNerdRanch Cocoa Bootcamp

FROM : Scott Ellsworth
DATE : Mon Jun 05 19:48:40 2006

On Jun 4, 2006, at 5:43 PM, ChrisB wrote:

> I have been given the opportunity to attend my choice of the Cocoa 
> Bootcamp in August, or the WWDC. Being new to Cocoa and Mac 
> development in general I would like a bit of input on which would 
> be more useful. My background is with PHP and Perl, but have made 
> good inroads with Cocoa in the last few months of working through a 
> few projects. Work will foot the bill on this one, but I want to 
> know where the best use of the resources may be. WWDC has lots of 
> small sessions that look very interesting, but without the schedule 
> yet it hard to know and plan what I can and can't expect to hit. I 
> figure you all here would be the ones to know.


I have hit four of the last five WWDC, and they have all been worth 
the time.  The big key, though, is going in ready.  Make sure you 
know what you want to discover, then try to find the people who know 
it.  Most presentations have a QA session, and many of the presenters 
are also available in the DTS labs during the week.

Especially, try to have a small list of problems, ideas, or 
questions, and take them to the hands on labs.  These are often your 
best chance to get to DTS and Core OS engineers.  In the Java lab, 
the entire team less one was hanging out last year, which made it 
really, really easy to show them why I wanted certain bugs 
prioritized higher.  (Whether they did that, I do not know, but at 
least they knew why some bugs were blockers for me.)

I brought some nasty Core Data questions to WWDC 2005, and ended up 
with some very high caliber talent - Chris Hanson and Ron Leu-Sang 
both spent serious time in the lab, and we chased a bug/missing 
feature out into the light.  More importantly for my app, we found 
workarounds.

I have not attended BNR, but for the Lake Forest Cocoaheads chapter, 
I put together a summary of comments from attendees.  This is 
available at <http://www.iceweasel.com/~scott/BNR_review.html>. 
These comments were generally positive, and found it worth while in 
the main.  It is training, and one of the fastest ways to come up to 
speed on ObjC/Cocoa by all reports.

Post script the first: if you have attended BNR, and want your 
comments added, please send them to me.  I asked some specific 
questions, included in the page, but I accept free form input too. 
Comments are only edited to conceal identities; let me know if you 
want your full or partial name included.

Post script the second: Our next meeting is on 6/13; we will be 
discussing CGLayers, perhaps Core Graphics radial fills, and very 
likely more on Shark.

Scott