What's WWDC??

End-users often ask me what exactly happens at WWDC, or any other development conference for that matter. The question can catch me off-guard. I’ll stumble around for a minute or two as I struggle trying to explain exactly what I get out of a conference like C4 or WWDC. Rob Griffiths from Macworld is attending WWDC this week, and wrote an article on MacCentral to explain just that…

The more immediate connection to Apple employees is certainly one of the biggest advantages of attending WWDC, and I have taken advantage of this a few times this week. However, if I had to choose one key reason to attend a developer conference like this, it would be to have the opportunity to connect and share ideas with other indie developers. Arguably the most innovative applications come from development shops with fewer than 5 developers. These are the applications on the leading edge. Being an indie developer gives us flexibility to choose the latest technologies, and WWDC is a great place to share ideas and talk about how we handle business, marketing, and customer support.

Last night, while listening to Ozomatli perform live at the WWDC San Francisco Bash, I had the pleasure of talking with Luis de la Rosa, Brian Cooke, Tom Harrington, and Lemont Washington about such topics. Other than Luis, I hadn’t spoken to any of these developers much, but it was great extending some connections and talking about Leopard technologies and their effects on our own applications.

Of course a big attraction of WWDC is learning the new APIs and improving our development skills, but that’s just part of the picture. Between the instructional sessions, access to Apple engineers, and sharing ideas with other developers, WWDC is an awesome developer conference. It’s definitely an event I wouldn’t want to miss.