I love training. Sure, it is hard work and being “on” for several days straight can be exhausting. For a dedicated multi-tasker like myself, focussing on just one task for three straight days seems very strange. I don’t really mind the travel, though I hate being away from my family. Maybe it is all the generations of teachers in my family cheering me on. I love meeting all the new students, eager to learn the secrets of mobile application development. I love the challenge of walking in to a room full of new faces and forming connections that, with some, will last for years. It’s a rush.

Me And Happy Students In Chicago

Me And Happy Students In Chicago


For about ten months I held the position of lead trainer and courseware designer for the iPhone Bootcamp. It was a great run – I trained more than 120 students in courses from New York to LA to London, spoke to user groups and hosted parties in a fantastic Victorian mansion in San Francisco at WWDC. I consistently got top ratings and reviews and have a great relationship with many of my students. (Example here on YouTube: Testimonial of Dr. Debbie Berebichez)
Me And Happy Students In Los Angeles

Me And Happy Students In Los Angeles


After some deliberation, we at CodeFab decided we could offer a superior training class that we could put our reputation behind. It gives me great pleasure to introduce CodeFab’s iPhone Training Program. I’ve always owned my own training materials, and the arrival of the 3.0 iPhone OS and SDK offered the perfect opportunity to do a rewrite on the materials and an update to the topics covered in the 3-day Intro Class. Additionally we are adding a 1-day Advanced Class that should be of great interest to all of my old students. We are starting with classes in New York City, Chicago and LA, with San Francisco and London in the works for 2010.

Los Angeles iPhone Developer Meetup Group

New York iPhone Developer Meetup Group

Chicago iPhone Developer Meetup Group

 

…So what happened to the iPhone Boot Camp? By late summer 2009 I came to the conclusion that the iPhone Boot Camp had become an organization I was no longer comfortable being associated with. (feel free to contact me off-line to find out why) Owner Jonathan Sarno and I had different ideas of how training should be done and what our relationship should be, and my attempts to work this out went nowhere.

Ummm, yeah.  Sure.  What does this accomplish?

Ummm, yeah. Sure. What does this accomplish?

Recently I’ve been blocked from all the bootcamp Meetup groups (though videos of me teaching and testimonials about my classes are still used to sell seats).

Regardless, the upshot is that by moving our training to the CodeFab name, we can continue to insure a quality training experience for all. And we can all enjoy me being interviewed late at night in London, after much socializing, with my sunglasses on: TechFuff.tv interviews the iPhone Guru

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JAOO2_009I just got back from a great micro-speaking tour in Europe. The lovely folks at Trifork invited me to Århus, Denmark, to speak at the JAOO 2009 conference. I was connected to Trifork through an old NeXT connection – their CTO is Kresten Krab Thorup, who had worked on Objective-C at NeXT in Redwood City for three years. (that’s him in the picture, introducing the conference.)

I gave a new talk on The Architecture of Advanced iPhone Applications – discussing design patterns and development strategies for managing the internal tasks of a complex iPhone app. This is a topic that isn’t really covered by any of Apple’s documentation and examples and was well received and well attended. The slides can be downloaded here.

In the iPhone track I was followed by Raven Zachary from Small Society, who is well known for doing the Obama ’08 iPhone app. He gave an excellent talk on how to successfully launch and market iPhone applications. We shared the speaker roster with a number of interesting prominent people (Dave Thomas! Martin Fowler! Urs Hölzole! Simon Peyton-Jones!). They gave fascinating talks on high-performance web applications, new programming languages and all manner of advanced computer science topics. It was an odd feeling, listening to their talks, as these topics were so important to me a couple of years ago when CodeFab was all about big web applications and we debated Ruby vs Python, Springs vs WebObjects in Java. After 18 months working on native iPhone applications it is hard for me to conjure the fire that once burned in me for AJAX and the latest features in server technologies.

PlaneToZurich After JAOO we flew to Zürich for the Zürich iPhone Developer Day event. Raven and I had the good fortune to be flown down with Trifork’s CEO in a private plane. (Piper Meridian for those curious, nothing fancy. That’s me, getting ready to climb aboard.)

There was a great crew of iPhone speakers in Zürich. Raven, Patrick Linskey and I came down from Denmark. We were joined by Jonas Schnelli from Include7 who wrote the very popular SBB train schedule application for the Swiss train system, the always entertaining Adrian Kosmaczewski founder of akosma software, who laid down the 10 Commandments of iPhone Development and Patrick Bönzli from Netcetera, who gave a great talk on automated builds and unit testing for iPhone applications.

iPhoneZurich

(Delightful staff manning the conference check-in desk…)

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