Today marks the start of DCWEEK, D.C.’s second annual 10-day jam-packed digital festival. Ten thousand tech-savvy people are expected to congregate all over town for hundreds of panel discussions, parties, and events on topic ranging from hot tech trends to geek fashion. There will be a lot of tweeting.

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With so many people, events, and locations to juggle, things could get mighty tricky for folks who just want to catch a session on agile software development. But take heart. Peter Corbett, CEO of iStrategyLabs and one of DCWEEK’s founders, spoke to us about how people can manage the tech festival. Even people who would never attend a tech festival.

1. Dress appropriately

“The tech community has a sort of uniform,” Corbett explains. “Jeans and tee shirts are the norm.” Expect a lot of “geeky shirts that say funny things, like ‘nom nom nom,’ and it’s a cat eating a cheeseburger.”

Corbett himself plans to don jeans and Pumas.

2. Don’t be frightened by terminology

Words like “patent troll” and concepts like “open source vs. proprietary software” are foreign to the uninitiated. But simple meanings often lie behind these techy terms.

Take Sunday’s planned “Hackathon,” which conjures images of criminal activity, or a peculiar beating. In fact, the Hackathon is a gathering of 150 web and mobile developers all working on applications and competing for a $20,000 prize. “It’s just people coding furiously, eating pizza and drinking Red Bull,” Corbett explains. Not frightening at all!

3. Be sure to say hello to the Ford Twittering Cake

Do not miss the chance to communicate with a baked confection at the closing party. “We have built some technology and baked it into the cake, literally,” says Corbett. If you tweet with the cake’s hashtag, the Ford Twittering Cake will say your tweet. Or something.