On June 6th, I set out to attend my first WWDC. I flew to San Francisco a couple of days early to help acclimate to the 2 hour time difference and to make registering on Sunday a fairly easy proposition.
One quick thing I did was visit the “Mothership”. That’s right, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino, CA. Apple opens the Company Store on Sunday just for WWDC. The campus Company Store is the only place you can buy licensed Apple apparel. I really wanted a shirt or two, and I wasn’t disappointed. Here’s the requisite picture in front of the sign:
Monday morning was the keynote, and while I got in line late (8:30ish I think), I was able to secure a seat at the back of the main hall. Seeing an Apple keynote live instead of refreshing a bunch of browser tabs was a great experience. Of course, everything after that is under an NDA. I’ll just say, the sessions are definitely worth the money. I can’t wait for the videos to come out so I can watch the sessions I couldn’t make it to because something I was interested in overlapped.
One thing that most WWDC guides I’d read getting ready mentioned to stay for the Q&A portion of the sessions because they are not included in the videos and usually provided some extra info. I’d say this year, that wasn’t the case. There wasn’t any Q&A that I considered “couldn’t miss”. Maybe it had something to do with their being 60% first timers at the conference.
One of the cool things they had at the conference was a wall of Cinema Displays showing thousands of App Store icons. The icons “bounced” when that particular app was purchased on the store. It was on about a 5 minute delay.
The other thing I knew I wanted to do while at WWDC was to meet a lot of developers that I’d only interacted with either via Twitter, blogs, or AIM. I think I did pretty well on that score, meeting a lot of my Twitterstream in person as well as meeting a lot of other folks I immediately added to that stream.
A microcosm of what I’m talking about: At the Beer Bash on Thursday night, I found myself talking to Jamie Phelps (Agile Web Solutions, makers of 1Password), Mike Taylor (developer of Houdini), Jim Clark (co-worker who attended with me), Keith Duncan (Realmac Software, makers of RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper), Steve “Scotty” Scott (Mac Developer Network), Brent Simmons (developer of NetNewsWire) and Mike Lee (formerly Delicious Monster, now at Apple). We were having a great conversation about old systems we had to work on and some of the painful lessons we learned along the way.
It was an incredible week of learning and discussions with folks. I can’t wait for next year. Here’s a link to my full WWDC09 Flickr Set.
