Date: 2011-06-12 12:07:37 Created: 2011-06-12 08:01:23
If you want the shortest possible summary it is this:
WWDC 2011 was a great conference. Go to WWDC whenever you get the chance.
It is Apple’s developer conference. It is five days packed with sessions and labs covering all the latest and greatest Apple is releasing.
It is a chance to put faces to Apple and its products. Apple working the way it does, this is a pretty rare thing and a very valuable one too. I came away realizing that Apple, too, is full of people just like all the rest of us.
It is 5200 developers lining up every single chance they get. We are joking – at least we are hoping so – that back home we will be able to out-queue just about anyone. It really was insane, you would walk to a new session only to find the line stretching around two or three corners, the first people in line looking like they may have camped out overnight in order to get their position. The really strange thing was that most of it seemed to be unnecessary. I did hear of people being turned away for some sessions, but even those times when I got in line late and far back I had no problem getting a seat. So, to some extent it felt like we were all lining up without good reason.
All these lines definitely affected the feel of the conference. There was not much sense of being social between sessions, people were mostly just rushing to get their snacks and coffee (all of which were very plentiful, I never saw anything run out despite people grabbing plenty of all they could get their hands on (especially those juice bottles)) and then get in line for the next session. Even so, it clearly shone through that people were interested in meeting and greeting, I had many nice if brief conversations with people in the various lines. For me, it also made clear how americans are really good at socializing and mingling, having a nice chat for a while and then moving on.
It is also a bubble of its own. Once you are at WWDC, everything else suddenly becomes rather disconnected. I recall looking at a newspaper twice during the week, and the second time was while waiting for the others before beginning the trip back home. Things are going on and filling your mind all the time, and whatever else may be going on in the world seems both distant and rather lacking in interest.
I read several advisories and opinions beforehand about prefering sessions over labs or vice versa. For my part, I went to sessions all the time, but I can definitely see myself altering that balance in any way imaginable if or when I go again. I think someone who spends all her time in labs has a whole different WWDC than those who focus soley on sessions, and both extremes as well as any mixtures are great ways to spend ones time. I think it is good to have some questions or subjects prepared to get the most out of labs, but it seems you can also have great general discussions about relevant topics during labs. The real point, I think, is that you have to be a bit more active to make use of lab time. If you are, then you will get lots out of it. If you prefer being ”fed” great information, you will be happy sticking to sessions.
I and my companions went back and forth several times on the burning question of when to get in line for the keynote. If you want a good seat, you have to get up while it still feels like late last night. Be too late in line, and you may not even get a seat inside the main presentation hall. However, getting a bad seat or ending up in a differnt room does not mean you will see less of what happens on the stage. There are huge screens displaying the goings-on. It is the very same things you see when the keynote is watched online. So what you can miss is seeing people gesturing in the distance, and if you want more presence than that you have to get in line Earlier.
At first, we were thinking we may just as well get in line early. Being jetlagged Europeans, getting up at the required time would not present too much of a problem. But then, we realized just how behind we already were on sleep, having flown in and lost sleep and timezones the day before. Not only that, we also realized that getting up early meant not just being a zombie the whole day, but also standing around outside, on concrete, for seven hours or so. Sense won out. We set our alarms for 07:00, had coffee in the nice, soft and warm hotel lobby and only then got in line. A line which almost started at the entrance to the Moscone, stretching around four blocks or so. The guy walking along the line shouting about false prophets and various biblical things did not seem all that out of place.
In any case, we got in, we got seats in the back of the main presentation room and the screens showed us everything clearly while we could also watch the actual people in the distance. It felt completely right to not have got up at three in the morning, even if the feeling of presence was not really there.
WWDC can pretty much be a round-the-clock experience if you want it to. There were plenty of parties and gatherings to choose from each evening, most of them completely free but often asking for pre-registration. As a result, I signed up to plenty of things and ended up going to a subset. In a way I would have liked to go to more parties and thus get more time to chat with other developers, but in each instance the choice to do something else instead was a good one. Hanging out with my co-travellers, seeing more of the town or just catching up on sleep are all good things to do. So, no regrets at all.
The Apple-arranged beer bash on Thursday was a great one too. There was plenty of good food and drink (apparantly much better than last year) and great music. The only bad thing was that all of a sudden it was over and we were all ushered out of the area. A rather abrupt ending, but why not end on top, right?
It was my first time in the United states, and I found San Francisco to be a great city to be in. We took the opportunities we had to be tourists – taking walks through Chinatown, Fisherman’s wharf, catching the cable cars, going to Alcatraz and eating in plenty of nice places – but we would all have liked more time to just see the city and sights. I could easily have given the conference exactly all of my focus, holing up in my hotel room playing with new software in any spare time, but if you are in a new place you owe it to yourself to get a feel for it. Escpecially when it is a place as nice as San Francisco.
Attending WWDC has seen me increase my use and appreciation of Twitter rather markedly. Once you find a tag or two to search by, and begin filtering tweets by proximity it gives you a whole new and different contact surface to the people and events around you. Very nice, and another WWDC learning I am looking forward to making much more use of.
Blink.
Blink.
I am back in my own kitchen again, having coffee from an Alcatraz cup and trying to sift through all those impressions. The week was both nicely long and also blazingly short.
To sum things up, the next time I go to WWDC I want to do more of pretty much everything. More labs, more coding, more hanging out with new people, more seeing of San Francisco … Another week where you only had coding time and labs during the days would have been perfect. Now, I will not realize most of what I should have asked in labs until days or weeks after I get back home.
WWDC in every part felt like a show put on by Apple at the height of its power – confident, full of news and focus. The era of Steve is ending, and it is wrapping up all it stands for in great style and shape. What comes next is as uncertain as always, but I am sure it will be a good ride. WWDC 2011 was a great thing to have participated in, and I look forward to coming back in the future.
Thanks to all the people I talked to, to all the people I almost got to know.
Here’s to the crazy ones.