My Experience Attending WWDC19: A Dream Come True

I work at Mumbai based after sales focused startup Servify. I have been following WWDC ever since I started working on iOS 👨‍💻 in 2012. It’s astonishing how Apple Engineers have built the foundations of the iOS platform.

I was missing an opportunity to attend WWDC in person for the last two years because of the Visa issue even though I had office-sponsored tickets to attend the event in 2017 and 2018. I was quite depressed about it. However, I was lucky to attend it in person this time, and it was a quite big event in recent times with some big announcements.

I landed a day before the event and did my check-in to collect the event badge and super cool reversible jacket at the event venue San Jose McEnery Convention Center. Got some magnetic stickers including the India 🇮🇳 flag which I loved ❤️ the most.

On the first day, I was super excited when I was in a queue. It was like a dream come true. I was texting back to my friends back in India about my excitement. Apple staff was so energetic and enthusiastic while welcoming each and everyone at the event. I was thrilled when I entered Hall 2 to attend the main Keynote. Could see around 6000 people coming to attend the event in person from so many different countries. Excitement and joy on everybody’s face were quite noticeable.

Goosebumps, when Apple started Keynote with a video about App developers. It’s quite amazing how they admire and value App developers. Everyone went crazy when Apple CEO, Tim Cook, came on stage with his Good Morning. It was quite unbelievable to see him in person. Craig Federighi was full of excitement when talking about new announcements. I won’t talk much about what they announced in Keynote as it’s already available on the internet.

Andy McNally has already captured the Apple Keynote announcement in his post.

After Keynote, while coming out of Hall 2, I got to meet popular YouTuber, Jonathan Morrison. I follow him on YouTube for his tech reviews. Yeah! I clicked a selfie with him 🤳.

After the Keynote, all the platform beta was available to download through the Ethernet setup they did on the arranged desks. Tried installing iPad OS beta on my 5th-generation iPad several times; however, it failed due to a server error. Finally, I was able to get it up and running the next day. Quite unstable and it has many bugs but liked it when I played around with it for a while.

The next main big session on day 1, was the Platforms State of Union. Major highlights for me were iPad OS, Dark Mode, and SwiftUI. iPad OS, which is built on the foundations of iOS and an in working towards bringing iPad and Mac Apps together. SwiftUI, a significant shift in building Apps. They made it easy for developers to make great user interfaces and adapt them to various Apple platforms. Another thing that caught my attention was how Apple finds it essential to consider geographical aspects and accessibility while building its products.

Before calling it a day, there was an announcement of the Apple Design Awards. There were 9 winners of this award.

List of winners: https://developer.apple.com/design/awards/

Apple considered Innovation, Trust, Refinement, Aesthetics, Inclusion, and Attention to detail while choosing winners and making their decisions. At every announcement, they showed how the App or Game stands out with these aspects. Quite thrilled when these teams came on stage to collect their awards. Mostly, they were all small teams with dedication, focus, and creativity.

There were several sessions and tech labs from day 2. I attended most all the interesting sessions. I will not write about every session that I attended as I won’t be able to express them in detail. However, here is a link to watch these sessions online.

Link: https://developer.apple.com/wwdc19/

Here are the sessions which I attended during dub dub. I would recommend it to every Apple developer to watch.

Day 1

• Keynote
• State of Platforms
• Apple Design Awards

Day 2

• What’s New in XCode?
• Introducing iPad Apps for Mac
• What’s new in Machine Learning?
• Core ML 3 Framework
• What’s new in iOS and macOS Design?

Day 3

• Create ML for Object Detection and Sound Classification
• Implementing Dark Mode on iOS
• Swift UI Essentials
• Advances in UI Data Sources
• Adopting Swift Packages in Xcode
• Designing Award-Winning Apps and Games
• Modernizing Your UI for iOS 13

Day 4

• Data flow through Swift UI
• Debugging in Xcode 11
• Testing in Xcode
• Roving for a Better World (Not available online)
• Modern Swift API design
• Integrating SwiftUI
• Mastering Xcode Previews

Day 5

• Building Custom Views with SwiftUI
• Great Developer Habits
• Designing Great ML Experiences
• Sesame Street: 50 Years and Counting (Not available online)

There was quite a lot to learn from these sessions. Sessions on SwiftUI and Dark Mode were my favorite. Can’t wait to get my hands on Xcode 11 to write code to build SwiftUI.

Amongst all the sessions following were my favorite.

Roving for a better world

Dr. Ayanna Howard, one of Forbes’ 2018 U. S. top 50 Women in tech shared her experience of designing robots for future Mars missions. She explained the challenges she and her team faced while designing the robots and how they overcame them. She also spoke about global warming which is a real issue the world is facing.

Great Developer Habits

This was the session which I was very keen to attend. It takes dedication, patience, and focus. It’s about enjoying the process of getting there almost as much as the destination. Hidden details matter and as developers, we have to care about these details. I will recommend this session to every developer around.

Sesame Street: 50 Years and Counting

Brown Johnson, EVP and Creative Director for Sesame Workshop shared her experience of working on Sesame Street and a lot of behind-the-scenes stories. How this great show has evolved over the years and become part of so many children across the globe. I was quite amazed by their journey.

While attending these sessions, I got to know a few developers from India as well as a few working in different countries. With Indian developers, we got to exchange our experience of the good work that we do at our respective companies. And work culture differences with NRIs I met. Everyone has their perks and challenges. Staying away from home and missing India is what everyone spoke about. We connected on WhatsApp/Twitter/LinkedIn with a promise to stay connected. Got to interact with random folks from different countries before the session started. They worked on brilliant ideas and beautiful UI. They were also surprised to see what we have built at Servify.

Several Tech labs were going from Tuesday to Friday. I visited some of them to interact with Apple Engineers. Their politeness, careful listening, and suggestions about using Apple technology were brilliant.

Swift Strike, the AR Kit 3 game. There was a section for this amazing game that Apple is working on and attendees were having fun competing against an opponent on iPad. As the game was under development, they were taking feedback and releasing builds with bug fixes every day. It was fun to watch it. Waiting for it to be released on the App Store.

During the event, I got to catch up with some of the Apple India Developer Advocates. I knew some of them as we work closely with Apple at Servify and I have been to Apple Developer Accelerator in Bengaluru. They were keen to know the issues we faced during the development and the ideas that we are working on.

On Thursday evening, there was The Bash for developers. Weezer https://music.apple.com/in/artist/weezer/115234

were performing at the bash. I never listened to them before but I liked their music. It was a good networking evening. We had fun with the guys we met at the event. It was a nice feeling that attendees across the world were exchanging good laughs.

I am grateful to Servify for sponsoring my trip to WWDC and giving me a chance to be part of one of the best conferences around the world.

After 5 long days with a lot of announcements and exciting sessions, WWDC19 was over on Friday. Key take away for me were

1. Apple staff’s energy and excitement to welcome attendees. Their enthusiasm all the time during the event. The way Apple treats developers and values developer productivity is much appreciated.
2. It does not take a big team to build great Apps but dedication, focus, and attention to detail do. Ideas, creativity, and efforts teams put in to achieve something unbelievable are what I saw during design awards.
3. Accessibility, how important it is to consider if we want to build Apps for everyone. There are so many people around us with some sort of disabilities and they find it difficult to use our products if not designed considering accessibility.
4. Saw people around the different parts of the world using their Apple devices and speaking different languages. Users across different places have cultural differences and we can’t ignore them in product design.
5. Socialize to share ideas and take feedback. It’s really important to talk to different people and understand their views. In the end, we are not building products for just ourselves or our friends and family.

As Apple says, let’s make this world a better place with our work.