Apple WWDC 2016 Experience
- Chan Jing Hong
- Sep 7, 2016
- 4 min read
UPDATE: It's time for WWDC 2017! I don't want to post a similar article here again, so do check out "Experiencing WWDC as a scholar" that I wrote on medium.com.
It was on the 10th May, 2016 when I received the email below and almost get a heart attack. I've been lucky enough to be selected as one of the 350 scholarship recipients to attend Apple's annual Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).
I was doing my internship at the time, and it was my boss who convinced me to give the WWDC scholarship a go. When I announced to everyone that I DID in fact won the scholarship, he decided to sponsor me and two other employees (he managed to get one of them a ticket to WWDC as well) to go on a trip to San Francisco with me. And that's when I almost get a heart attack for the second time. HUGE thanks to you Jason.
Finally, I arrived at the San Francisco International Airport after a whopping 14 hour flight including a 6 hour transit at Shanghai airport. Given the fact that it is my first time in not only San Francisco but the States itself, the whole environment is pretty fresh to me. We sat the train from the airport to 16th Mission st, and that's when we decided to take the journey to our Airbnb home at Steiner st by foot instead of using a cab.
The entire walking journey took us around 40 minutes to complete. It's not such a bad idea as we get to look around and experience the city for the first time after sitting on our asses for 14 hours straight, but it certainly was a tiring one considering we have to carry around all our baggages. There's me in the picture on the left, rolling my luggage to our Airbnb. And on the right is taken on the scholarship orientation, the day after.
The WWDC keynote is happening at 14th June, 11 am in the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium. Along with other WWDC attendees, we've decided to queue and wait in front of the Auditorium 6 hours before the keynote. It was a pretty amazing experience, as we get to chit chat with the other attendees from all over the world, and some of them brought their own chair, food, and even sleeping bags! We are all glad that we queued up this early, as the line becomes REALLY long by the time it's 6:30 am.
Left: Bill Graham Civic Auditorium at 4 am. Right: The queue behind us, at 6:30 am.
The WWDC Keynote begins with Tim Cook walking on stage, and asking the audience to give a moment of silence for the victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. After that he proceeded to introduce the latest and greatest technologies available for us developers. I'm not going to go in details on what is announced that day, a quick google search will give you all the details you need (If you're interested, Macworld have written an article on it here). After the keynote, there is a download room available for us to download all the latest beta software. I did a quick speed test and found out the download speed is on average 906 mbps! That's crazy compared to what I have at home (15 mbps of download speed if I'm lucky).
For the following 4 days, Labs and Sessions are held at Moscone West. It is during the Labs where we get to meet the engineers who worked on the Apple technologies directly and get one on one consultation with them. And during the Sessions, we get to watch in-depth presentations on the Apple technologies such as the "what's new in the Cocoa touch framework" and how to create iMessage apps and stickers. What I find particularly interesting about is their UI/UX Design labs. I've heard that they are very popular, and thus require pre-booking online early in the morning to ensure a spot. All thanks to my colleague, we managed to get a spot to go for the UI/UX Lab. We are given a private "booth", and one of Apple's app designer is assigned there to talk to us (Let's call him Adam). The booth is fully covered and we are not allowed to record any the conversations that went on inside there. We showed Adam some of our apps and he gave us feedback and some tips. He also told us that he's one of the guys involved in designing Maps for iOS 10.
By the way, check out this awesome wall of code! Martin Conte Mc Donnel from Lyft even managed to "reverse-engineered" the wall to text. You can check it out right here: http://wwdcwall.com/
Throughout the labs session we get to meet tons of interesting people, ranging from 11 year olds with 3 years of development experience to a Siri backend engineer, and also to hear lots of inspiring stories. It is truly an eye opening experience for me to hangout amongst all these talented people.
Aside from WWDC, we also visited Apple's headquarters at Cupertino, and as well as the Google campus. As much as an Apple fan I am, I'd hate to say I'm a little disappointed at my visit to the Apple HQ. There wasn't anything much to do there as normal people aren't allowed into the building, other than their merchandise store. Although they sell some pretty cool merchandise that aren't available anywhere else in the world. Google however was fun! We rode around the huge campus on the G-Bikes, met some Androids and self-driving car, and didn't forget about the merchandise store. The campus is designed to look more like a University than an office. There is just so much more to see there, the landscape is amazing as well.
This trip will certainly be one of the highlights of my life, what an experience it is to be travelling with such awesome friends and meeting so many brilliant people.Thank you Apple for giving me a chance to participate WWDC 2016, and thank you everyone else that supported me and helped me along my journey. Finally, thank you San Francisco for giving me such a pleasant experience there. We will meet again very soon!
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