I was fortunate enough to be able to attend BACON over the past few days, coined as ‘The conference on things developers love’.

One of the things I loved about BACON compared to other conferences was how broad the spectrum of developers attending and the talks the speakers made were. It was nice to meet developers with other technical backgrounds aside from my own of primarily Cocoa and Objective-C.

It was a fantastic conference, and as with the other fantastic conferences I’ve been to, I’m always left with that buzzing feeling afterwards: I come away wanting to build or do something great. It really helps me to realign and refocus what I’m doing and gives me inspiration going forward.

I’d never really been able to articulate this feeling before, but I saw one of the other attendees describe it as ‘conference energy’, which I thought was a great description. And it’s contagious:

Conference energy is contagious. My friend’s first thought after recounting #devslovebacon: ‘Fuck, I need to go make something’.

— Alex Rozanski (@alexrozanski) April 14, 2013

Today marks the end of the third NSConference I’ve been to. I attended NSConference in 2010 and 2011 which were held at Wokefield Park, but this year it was set in the beautiful, Art Deco-style Athena conference venue in Leicester. After three days at this year’s caffeine-rich, whisky-fuelled and mixology-teaching NSConference, I’m shattered.

Although touted as a Mac and iOS developer event, NSConference has evolved in recent years to cover topics more than just development, and have resulted in talks focussed on areas like design and the indie software business. Criticism from last year (although I didn’t attend myself) seems to have been that the list of talks had swung too far the other way, but this year there seemed to be a nice balance talks about software development but also other areas involved in building apps.

The thing I’ve always liked about NSConference is how sincere it feels; you can tell that it’s put on by a great bunch of people who really care about the community and want to hold a fantastic event. It’s not a conference plagued by advertising and sponsorship, and any that’s there is done in a very tasteful, unobtrusive way.

The proof is in the pudding: I always come away from NSConference with a buzz, inspired to build something great. Although incredibly busy lately, I hope that this will be the year that I build and release something of my own.

Today I begin the third decade of my life, and draw a line in the sand under my teenage years. Here’s the story so far: