The first time I attempted to get a ticket for WWDC was 2012. There is a longer story about why I didn’t manage to get a ticket that year which you can read here. In 2013 WWDC sold out in 3 minutes; by the time I read the email it was too late. 2014 was the first year Apple gave tickets using a lottery and again I had no luck. But this year, I got a ticket! Yoo-hoo!
I arrived in San Francisco on Sunday afternoon, jet-lagged but excited. The taxi driver failed to deliver me to the right address but fortunately my good friend Michael who was going to host me managed to locate me.
After dropping off my luggage we set off to Moscone Centre to pickup my badge. The Apple employee delivering my badge was quite excited as well because I was wearing a Guns n Roses t-shirt!
Believe it or not people don’t just queue for the next iPhone. They also queue all night for a seat at the front rows during the keynote. Me personally I wasn’t going to camp out of Moscone Centre all night so I arrived at Moscone Centre at 6:30am. By the time I got there the queue was literally going around the building!
Few hours later I was finally inside the keynote presentation room! Although Tim Cook was looking pretty blurry given the fact that I was quite behind in the room the whole thing was pretty exciting. Apple announced Mac OS X El Capitan, iOS 9, watch OS 2, News, Spotlight Search and of course Music. Yeah, they’ve done better in the past but I think they didn’t do too bad this year either.
The rest of the week went by pretty fast. Apple was quite organised although they struggle a bit with some aspects. Long queues to enter the sessions and Wi-Fi that wasn’t always working were the main issues.
As for sessions I managed to catch up with a lot of the watch OS 2 developments. I was also very impressed with the new search API & deep linking features introduced (this is going to be awesome!). And finally the new App Thinking functionality is pretty sweet. The last session I attended was about the new system font, San Francisco and, I admit, I didn’t understand everything but we have a rock star designer in the team to take care of this kind of stuff.
Have you ever seen a long line for the men’s toilets and no queue for the women’s toilet? Welcome to WWDC. Yes, we have long ways to go before we can say that there are enough women in software engineering.
Finally, as one Apple employee informed me there was a Cypriot, teenager winner (12–14 years old) of an Apple WWDC scholarship! Since Apple awards only 350 scholarships and in order to apply for a scholarship you need to actually create and submit an app to Apple that’s pretty impressive. I had no name and, unfortunately, I didn’t manage to locate him. Where are you? I’d love to meet you!
Going to WWDC was an awesome experience. I got to learn all the new and exciting stuff coming to iOS and watch OS and meet a lot of interesting people. Next step: Build great apps for iOS 9 and watch OS 2!
