Reflection on Attending WWDC 2017

This year I was fortunate to win a lottery ticket to attend WWDC Apple World Wide Developer Conference held yearly. This time it was in San Jose, CA. Now Lottery sounds good but we do have to pay for this ticket after winning just in case you were wondering. I attended WWDC before and it is always been a great and humbling experience. Attending in person gave me a chance to hangout with 1000s of developers from around the globe and enjoy this diversity of colors while learning new ideas, SDKs, and Frameworks.

This conference is packed with content sessions, labs and other events, not to mention other conferences that is during same week along with WWDC such as AltConf 2017. It is easy to get overwhelmed and lost in that crowded space. My strategy so far has been to try and spread my time 50/50 among sessions and labs, it worked this time as well. Sessions are great to learn new stuff, labs are in person to go deeper into code. More on this later.

Highlights for WWDC2017 for me it was focused on iOS mostly, while there are great things in watchOS and tvOS or macOS I mostly develop on iOS to keep it relevant.

MLKit - enables machine learning, neural nets to run local on mobile device, simply put it, amazing power.

NLP - Natural language processing yet another part of AI on mobile device along with SiriKit

ARKit - Augmented reality, very cool 3D rendering all on a device.

Files - finally I can see and manage files on iOS device as we do on computers with folders etc.

Drag and Drop - another cool UX feature to drag data around collections.

New hardware and VR demo in hands on section was great. One thing not clear why hands on area was only available 1st day for limited hours?

All Sessions @WWDC are recorded so anyone can review this later so no need to stress about not attending some of the sessions. Labs on the other hand only time you can debug your code and get help from Apple engineers in person, recommend to take advantage of this. Prior years labs were super helpful for me to resolve some issues, find bugs and learn in the process. But be aware cannot go to the labs with generic questions, it is not a lecture! Need to bring your code and specific questions or errors you struggle with to make it useful. Engineers are happy to help resolve actual code bugs rather than abstract concepts. This time for me it was around Autolayots and Swift build system, had troubles with binary frameworks not building in new Swift 4.0 on Xcode 9 and got it resolved. YES you get to try out all new tools too and new hardware.

This year was exciting to meet in person with youngest iOS developer, boy named Yuma from Australia only 8 years old started coding from 6 and has 6 apps in Appstore - AMAZING. And I got to meet the oldest iOS developer, a lady from Japan Masako Wakamiya is 82, she learned programming through online SKyoe lessons less than 1 year ago and created an app to teach Japanese cultural festival Hina-Matsuri. She is also an inspirational TED speacker - simply AMAZING. These people are inspirational for me to keep creating and active living no matter what age.