DevNation: The Year Ahead

In my last post, we looked back at Developer Day in 2009. All told, we're very happy with how the four events last year turned out. We think we can improve, however, so in 2010 we're looking to do more and do it better.

To start with, we're rebranding the event series. Developer Day was a good start, but it suffered from a few problems. Perhaps most importantly, it was a little too generic – there are all sorts of Developer Days (Google and Android, Apple, Facebook, and more), which made it hard to find content related to our particular event. Soon, we'll be changing to DevNation, which gives us both a shorter hashtag and builds something about community into the event name itself. (We'll be keeping the mission statement, so DevNation will still be a "low-cost, one-day, technology-agnostic, local event .")

In addition to the renaming, we'll be relaunching all of our associated web content – our Twitter account, website, and the like. As part of this, we'll be laying the groundwork for improved functionality and notifications, so if you've been desperate for ongoing information about our events, you'll be able to find it. One of our goals has always been to help grow cross-community bonds, and some of the new features we'll be launching will hopefully aid in that.

Names and websites are all well and good, of course, but the events themselves are still the foundation of the DevNation series. We've learned a lot from the four held this year, and we'll be testing just how well we absorbed those lessons as we expand to nine events in 2010.

View DevNation 2010 in a larger map

• January 30th - Austin, TX
• February 27th - Durham, NC
• April 3rd - Atlanta, GA
• May 22nd - Chicago, IL
• July 24th - San Francisco, CA
• July 31st - Portland, OR
• August 21st - Washington, DC
• September 18th - Philadelphia, PA
• October 23rd - Orlando, FL

(Some of these dates may change as we get closer to them, but we'll be confirming well in advance of each.)

We're very excited with the plans for DevNation in the coming year, and we hope you'll be able to join us at one of our stops – be sure to follow us at @developer_day for the latest news, and feel free to let us hear your comments and questions!