You know what’s in 58 days? 360|iDev 2011. The only 360|iDev this year.

Space at the hotel is almost gone, staying elsewhere is always an option, but we’ve got a good rate with the hotel might as well save some money… Don’t ya think?

This post is the beginning of a series of posts I’m gonna write counting down to the conference. Not daily or anything, but often. Each will have things you should know about the conference.

The first and most important thing you should know about 360|iDev is why we do it. We do it because back in 2009 we recognized that the iOS developer community had no central event to come together around. We launched 360|iDev to offer that. We found speakers via forums like Touch Arcade, and the Apple Dev forums. We reached out to people we knew or had heard of via twitter.

We didn’t make any money, but we didn’t expect to either. Making money is a huge plus and we wouldn’t have been upset if we had, but it wasn’t the goal. Nor was filling a conference center with 600 people.

In fact the first 360|iDev in 2009 only had 166 attendees, some 30 of which were speakers. We jumped to 222 in Denver in 2009. Our return to San Jose in 2010 brought 301 attendees. Our most recent 360|iDev in Austin TX saw a slight decline in numbers, 235.

We never wanted to be a 600+ person conference. The community can surely support that, and based on the popularity of iOS conferences this and last year, surely there’s interest in events. But what we always thought was special about 360|iDev and our other events was that we don’t want to be the biggest conference ever. We want to be the one where you can walk the halls and say hi other developers and know that those people know the pains of Cocoas2D, or Gamekit, etc.

We wanted to be the conference where rockstars in the community are eating lunch with a developer who’s just getting started, maybe he’s just decided to go indie and live his dream. The conference where the speaker from the session you were just in is sitting next you in this session, because while she’s a bad ass at OpenGL ES maybe she’s still wrapping her head around something else.

From the start we believed that providing an event that brought the community together was reward enough, we still do.