WWDC 2016 trip — recap

WWDC is behind us and now is a great time to write a recap post. 🙂

But first, maybe you’d like to check out the posts I wrote before the conference, so here they are: “WWDC — final destination, or just the beginning?” and “WWDC 2016 — final preparations”.

Day 0 — Saturday, June 11th

It all started with travelling to San Francisco, the total flight time was long, but totally worth it. 🙂

I watched “Eddie the Eagle” on the plane and it is one of the best movies I’ve watched in a while.

Day 1 — badge, Apple HQ, Stanford

Sunday was the day to do two major things: pick up the WWDC badge and cruise through the Valley. You can pickup your WWDC badge on other days but it is good to pick it up early on (Sunday) so you can have the rest of the day free and be able to get in line for the WWDC Keynote like a human being.

If you are travelling to SF or the Valley, be sure to visit Cupertino, Palo Alto, Stanford, etc. There are tours around Stanford campus a couple of times a day, so be sure to check the times for that, the one I went on was about 1 hour long, you walk around the campus with a student guide, see most of the campus and get a lot of information about the campus, history, programs, fun facts, etc.

Day 2, WWDC start

The first day of WWDC starts with the famous Keynote, where Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple gang present new stuff, this year they talked about new versions of iOS, tvOS, watchOS and macOS. There are also Platforms State of the Union (more details on new stuff) and *THE* Apple Design Awards ceremony on the first day of WWDC. You can checkout more about the conference here.

This year they moved the first day events to Bill Graham Civic Auditorium.

Day 3 & 4

All sessions and labs are held in Moscone West Tuesday-Friday. They were all livestreamed and recorded, you can watch them here. The sessions are great to get an overview & details on new APIs, best practices, etc. On the other side we have labs.

Labs are a place where you can sit down with Apple engineers and specialists and talk to them directly about your problems and questions. There are around 1000 Apple engineers ready for your questions. Since you can watch the sessions later, labs are one of the things that really make WWDC worth going to.

The hottest lab was User interface lab and you had to schedule an appointment. Every day at 7am the signup for that lab would open and in a minute or two all the appointments would get booked out. 🙂 I was lucky to get an appointment and had a great 30min consultation with an Apple UI guy about the new version of Photomath.

There are official Get-Together events almost every day at WWDC and one of them was education Get-Together where you could meet and talk to Apple experts and other developers in that field. Get-Togethers are a great chance to meet people in special fields and get some tips and tricks for different parts of the market.

Day 5

One of the special events at WWDC is the bash. But for some reason it is always on Thursday. It would have much more sense to have it on the last day as a conference ending party, they must have some reason to have it on Thursday. 😀

This year’s bash took place at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and Good Charlotte was rocking on the stage! #RockAndRollinBaby.

Day 6

As they say, all good things come to an end. The last day of WWDC was as great as all the others. It would have been great if there was some kind of farewell party, to close the conference. This way it just suddenly ends, and it feels kind of strange. 😀

Special Events

Tuesday-Friday there are guest speakers at WWDC. Every year there are some really interesting people talking and those events/talks come quite refreshing in lunch time. As Apple says: “Spend lunchtime getting inspired with talks by industry experts and luminaries.”.

This year’s guests were also great and I will give special attention to two of them.

The first one is Haben Girma, who is the first deaf blind person to graduate from Harvard Law School, she talked about “Disability and Innovation: The Universal Benefits of Accessible Design”.

The second one is Bill Rosemann, Marvel Games Creative Director, who talked about “Marvel: Making a Difference in the Real World”.

Food

At WWDC you’ll get an awesome breakfast, followed by a less awesome lunch, and some snacks and small meals in between. I ate a lot for breakfast, lots of croissants and juices, when I think about it now I get really hungry. 😀

General Tips

• I added sessions/labs into my calendar so I can know in each moment where I plan/need to be. Just to save time thinking about where you should go. The WWDC schedule is available in the official WWDC app and there’s a nice “Add to calendar” button. 🙂 The night before every conference day I’d go through the schedule for that day and add to my calendar the sessions/labs I 100% wanted to attend.
• When prepairing for WWDC there was an article (a couple of them) saying “bring ethernet adapters” so you can plugin. I don’t know how it was previous years, but this year there were a lot of “Download zones” with ethernet adapters already attached on ethernet cables with blazing speed internet. So you don’t need to buy your own. 🙂
• There is a “company store” selling tshirts, caps and other Apple swag in Moscone so check that out early, but be aware of the fact that each day day they bring some new items, different colors, etc. If you go to Cupertino there’s also some Apple swag to buy at the Apple Store in Infinite Loop and there are items that you can buy only there. 🙂
• If you have some time get a rental car and have a tour around the Valley, I did and it was awesome! 🙂
• If you send your employees to WWDC, they will always be grateful for it, I know I am :))
• I might add more tips here in the future… 🙂

I would like to thank once again to my company/employer Photomath for sending me to WWDC and giving me the chance to experience it. I dreamed about going to WWDC since I started with iOS development and watched the first WWDC keynote and sessions on my iMac. I will remember this always and again big THANK YOU!!! 🙂

P.S. thank you Nikola Devcic for proofreading this post and helped me make it fine as Apple products 😉

Originally posted at https://medium.com/@bsevo/wwdc-2016-recap-58eaa207a8f6