My standard conference behavior is to hang out in lobbies with friends during the day and attend parties at night. If I did happen to attend a talk I would spend most of the time making fun of the speaker. I remember sitting through an entire talk wondering if the alarm would sound if I tried to sneak out the back. I can't remember what the talk was about, but it was so extremely boring that I was worried we'd all die if we couldn't find a way out.
I guess that's the result of being totally uninterested in the content of the conferences I was attending. Working on Mono I was attending .net conferences at a time where really uninteresting things were being done with .net.
It was also the result of working on distributed teams and rarely getting a chance to hang out in lobbies and drink with my friends.
CocoaConf was different for me. I didn't make it to every talk (or even half of them) but I did have three sessions circled that I had to attend. I also had a few questions that I needed answered. So I went into CocoaConf with very different intentions and got very different results. Like actual useful knowledge and no hangover. I got out of CocoaConf exactly what I wanted.
Two of the talks I attended were the best I've ever attended. I guess that doesn't mean much after reading the first paragraph of this post though.
All the speakers were excellent. In particular, Jonathan Penn and Neven Mrgan. Everyone was well prepared. I enjoyed Guy English's keynote which was a nice blend of technical and non-technical stuff. I briefly met Guy and had a million questions for him, but he had lost his voice and forcing him to talk seemed cruel.
Boston has a good Mac/iOS community that was well represented. It was nice to hang out with and get to know people from Boston CocoaHeads.
I was surprised by how many attendees were from out of town. I met some kids from Atlanta that were building an iOS app for a university project, a guy that wrote an app I used when coaching hockey, and the person writing the Khan Academy iOS app (!!).
I started this post intending to conclude it with something like "you get out of conferences what you put into them" but then it kinda turned into a review of the conference, then it got really rambly (that's this part here). Maybe a better conclusion is you get out of conferences what other people put into them. Every speaker at CocoaConf had put serious effort into their presentations. The organizer's put serious effort into the logistics. The people working there put serious effort into their jobs. (You should have seen this kid run into the room and start setting things up for the next speaker after talks ended). And every attendee made an effort to greet and engage people.