Now that the dust has settled from Pebble’s third annual Developer Retreat, it's time to recap! Team Pebble and 50 of the best Pebble developers from around the world spent four days learning about designing for round displays, talking to our wrists, getting the first glance at Pebble Time Round, eating our fill of delicious foods, and finally touring around San Francisco to see the sights! It was terribly sad when it was all over and we had to go home.
But there's always next year! If you missed out this year let us know you're interested in next year's retreat!
You can check out what the full schedule was like here. We've now finished uploading all of the materials from the retreat so you can watch along with the attendees. You can find the full content of photos, videos, and presentations on their respective websites!
Full album on Flickr from Day 1 can be found here or you can see some in the slideshow below.
Eric Migicovsky (CEO) and Thomas Sarlandie (Director of Apps and Developer Ecosystem) officially welcome everyone to the 2015 Pebble Developer Retreat.
Liron Damir (Head of Design) discusses compelling design for Pebble and touches on the challenges of designing apps on a round screen.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Designing Apps for Pebble
A talk by Heiko Behrens (Developer Experience Engineer) about Pebble Time Round and designing for Chalk.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Developing for Round
We had our 1st anniversary of the PebbleSF Meetup during the retreat! Our attendees met the rest of the local community here in the Bay Area and socialized with more members of Team Pebble. We enjoyed delicious tacos, drinks, community demos, and great people! Here is a list of the presentations during the Meetup which can all be seen during the video:
Full album on Flickr from Day 2 can be found here or you can see some in the slideshow below.
Curious about how to design apps that look great on Pebble Classic, Pebble Time, and Pebble Time Round? Confused about how to structure and implement code for multi-platform apps using the Pebble SDK? Kevin Conley (Embedded Developer) will cover these topics as well as share several tips, tricks, and tools for creating amazing apps that run on all Pebble devices.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Creating Pebble Apps for Aplite, Basalt, and Chalk
Matthew Hungerford (Developer Experience Engineer) pushes pixels to their limits as he talks about graphical effects leveraging Pebble APIs and community libraries to create exceptional watchfaces and apps.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Pebble Graphics
Andrew Stapleton (Embedded Developer) deep dives into the internals of the Pebble Dictation API.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Voice on Pebble
Find out what has changed since PebbleKit iOS 2.0 and learn how to upgrade your projects. Discover how to take advantage of features of the new PebbleKit iOS with Marcel Jackwerth (iOS Developer).
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - PebbleKit iOS 3.0
Learn how to take advantage of the Pebble build system by creating customized wscripts that let you concatenate JS files, automatically run linters, and internationalize your apps with Cherie Williams (Developer Evangelist).
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - waf, wscript and Your Pebble App
Learn all about the Pebble timeline. Specifically when to use it and when not to use it. See some of the best use cases for timeline and find out why timeline gives your app a competitive advantage with Jon Barlow (Developer Advocate).
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Best Use Cases for Timeline
A short presentation to learn about creating awesome assets for the Pebble appstore with Aaron Cannon (Product Management).
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Awesome Appstore Assets
This session covered everything needed to get started with smartstraps, from the hardware connection to APIs on the watch to the Arduino smartstrap library with Brian Gomberg (Embedded Developer). This is the same talk we gave at Pebble Rocks Boulder and we have a similar video from the September PebbleSF Meetup if you're interested in smartstraps.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Smartstrap Workshop
Full album on Flickr from Day 3 can be found here or you can see some in the slideshow below.
We did our first live Google Hangout with the developers at a Pebble Meetup in Amsterdam! Jaron and Kristof of Kiezel Watchfaces gave us a hint of KiezelPay. You can sign up to learn more about in-app payments without creating your own mobile clients on their website.
A group discussion hosted by Kat McAuliffe (Event Engineer) about the worldwide Pebble Meetups. The feedback from this session helped spawn the new Meetup Website! If you're interested in recreating a piece of the developer retreat where you live, please contact us using that page's contact form.
A group discussion hosted by Katharine Berry (Developer Tools Manager) about Pebble APIs and Tools. This session filled the boardroom to capacity with retreat attendees who eagerly wanted to put forward their ideas and experiences of developing for Pebble. This session was a great success and this valuable feedback is being reviewed internally by the relevant teams and the requests will hopefully be integrated into future development plans.
A group discussion hosted by Jon Barlow (Developer Advocate) about the Pebble community. Forums, Slack, surveys, code samples, our newsletter, and community projects are just a few of the things we covered during this session. We got a lot of feedback about devsupport that we've already put in practice and response times will keep getting better! We love how much Slack has helped us connect with our community and to each other!
Jack Chai (Data Scientist) takes us through the new Developer Portal analytics and delves into battery performance. He also reveals some interesting insights into levels of user interaction and how your projects could benefit from integration with timeline.
Full slidedeck: #PDR15 - Data Analytics and Pebble
It was a whirlwind of code, design, friendships, and collaboration after 3 days at the retreat. We gave everyone the chance to demo what they had been working on (see mark 5:03 for demos) to the audience and then we recapped the event.
Awards were given out after closing ceremonies to six individuals who were chosen either by popular vote or Team Pebble for their extraordinary achievements. A list of the awards and their awardees are below.
Retreat Attendee Voted Awards
Team Pebble Voted Awards
The last day was reserved for having fun! There were three sightseeing tour options around San Francisco that attendees and Pebblers got to choose from: Segway Tour of Golden Gate Park, Segway Tour of Fisherman’s Wharf, and Motorized Cable Car City Tour. Photos below capture attendee's collective photos of the day, let us know if you have ones to share that aren't in the full album!
Thanks from all of us here at Team Pebble for another wildly successful retreat, we hope to see you next year!