Various observations from my week at Apple’s developer conference (WWDC):
- There were a few smokers at the conference and they would all go out on the patio on the third floor to smoke. None of them seemed to speak native English.
- Amazing how many people came in from outside the US for this. I met people from Canada, Columbia, Brazil, England, Germany, France, Spain and Australia, just to name a few off the top of my head.
- I always find it funny going to these conferences and seeing people I already know from Portland. In fact, I mostly see these folks, people who live minutes from my home and office, 1000 miles away rather than here in Portland.
- I also find it funny that I seemed to run into the same people all the time. For instance, I had breakfast with the same person every day. It wasn’t coordinated. It just happened that way.
- San Francisco is a lot dirtier than I remember it from six or seven years ago, the last time I spent any time in the city.
- I arrived on Sunday last week and left on Friday afternoon. Five days is exhausting. My brain didn’t slow down from the time I got off the airplane. It just kept running all week, day and night. On top of that, five hours of sleep a night — even without a running brain — isn’t enough sleep for me. I slept like crazy this past weekend.
- In one session the presenter asked how many had not shipped an app. About 2/3 of the room raised their hands. That surprised me especially since the sessions were fairly advanced. It was in a session, however, for beginners, so the ratio might have been skewed. (I went to a few beginner sessions just to make sure I didn’t miss anything in my learning process. Every session gave me at least a nugget or two.)
- 5000+ people at Moscone was more people than at my high school, undergrad and grad universities combined.
- I have never stood on so many lines in my life. There were lines into the building in the morning, lines into the breakfast/lunch room, lines into every session, lines to sign up for labs, lines into the men’s room. (One of the few times the lines were shorter into the women’s room than the men’s, which is a sad statement about the number of female developers, I am afraid.)
- I went to an event here in Portland yesterday sponsored by Edward Tufte. Very interesting discussion of infographics, or the use of visuals to represent large chunks of data. There were about 500 people there. Even though the Tufte crowd was 1/10 the size of WWDC, there were way more women in the crowd.
- It was a good week. I learned a lot, met some interesting people. But I sure am happy to be home.
