A couple of months ago, I was lucky enough to be awarded one of the highly prestigious Student Developer Scholarships from the Apple University Consortium, who are the nicest collection of dudes and ladies you ever did see. This scholarship, among other things, paid for my trip to one of the most interesting, exciting and excited-profanity-inducing events I’ve ever been to: Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference.
This conference is quite famous in that it’s focused at a very narrow audience - developers for Apple’s software platforms - but it’s looked forward to by a very large number of people, largely because of Apple’s tendency to announce new hardware and software at the keynote.
This keynote, which is the only part of the conference not covered by a non-disclosure agreement (so, sadly, I can’t talk to you about [REDACTED], nor how cool [REDACTED] is), was a truly amazing experience. 5000 of the world’s best developers packed into a simply massive room where the Reality Distortion Field was cranked up to full power.
After the keynote, the sessions provided an opportunity for drinking from the firehose. In amongst the learning, I ran into hundreds of fascinating developers, and worked out a huge pile of ideas to work on later.
After the conference, Secret Lab and I stayed in San Francisco for another couple of weeks, hanging around cafes, coding, and having meetings with all manner of excellent people. I did the usual tourist thing, visiting Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge and Golden Gate Park, and spend a good amount of time enjoying the fact that Google Transit worked so well in the city.
The next phase of the trip involved flying to an undisclosed location to visit the Tiki Bar, where we all sat around drinking cocktails and working out more excellent ideas. Doctor Tiki and Tosca are fantastic people, and it was fantastic to get explore the set and literally see behind the scenes. The Ocean Door actually opens onto the garden. I felt a little betrayed.
We then flew back up to San Francisco for more coding and meeting, and then Josh, Andrew and I packed up and flew back to Tasmania to take care of our frankly amazing backlog.
I’d like to thank the AUC for this fantastic opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to next year!