Smile made its way to WWDC again this year, moving with Apple’s change of venue from foggy SF to sunny San Jose. While the location may have been different, the bedecked buildings, faces and coffee shops were all the same. (Coffee shop = lots of). Shout out to the Social Policy coffee shop for over-taking the typical WWDC Hallway track with a Coffee Shop track. It was the spot to bump into five random people with whom you wanted to chat.
From the convention center, altConf, CocoaConf, hotel rooms, laps, and wherever high-quality wifi could be found, we watched the Keynote along with you. As AppleFans we watched with joy, as developers we watched with a discerning eye, on the lookout for clues of what new tools were coming our way.
After a busy Summer, we’ll emerge in the Fall, along with macOS High Sierra, having incorporated all that we can into our apps. This busy period is known everywhere as the “Summer hustle,” (we may have just made that up).
What were some of the topics this year? As if you haven’t read all about them already: subtle changes that may affect us all (a new App Store layout), big announcements (Macs! HomePods!), and exciting news about VR and AR (Who doesn’t want an infinite number of life-size scale models for testing ideas? Rapid prototyping and lean go together like peanut butter && jelly). Nice to see Apple bringing their sense of style and perfection to that nascent technology.
The other conferences which grew up around WWDC made an appearance, with their usual blend of talks ranging from big ideas to practical details.
This year AltConf was bigger and better than ever, reaching 1000 attendees. It ended as usual with James Dempsey’s Week in Review wrap up song. The song’s takeaway this year: props to the Xcode team, nice.
CocoaConf Next Door made an appearance with a stellar lineup of speakers. A takeaway for you: if you are the sole person sent on your team to a conference, maybe have a plan for training everyone on what you learned when you get back.
Layers, the designer’s conference, also made the move to SJ. It came with an underlying theme of “don’t just do good work, do good.”
Afterhours events are just as important as the day’s events, for schmoozing, trading ideas, making connections, maybe a little bit of imbibing.
And the week wound down with one of our favorite parts, the team gathering. As a remote team, it was nice to see the faces we work with, but in 3-D!
As the kids say about this time, “Have a nice summer.” – From Smile’s WWDC 2017 Yearbook
