‘Tis the season for WWDC Survival Guides. I don’t really have anything to add from my post last year, but I want to state an opinion contrary to the prevailing common wisdom: Don’t be afraid to eat the lunches.

Digression: C4 is/was known for its excellent sit-down meals between sessions. At first, it seemed horribly inefficient to an engineer brain to get up after a session, move “all the way” to the banquet room next door, have to pick out a seat again, only to return to the session hall and have to find a new seat–why not just leave my stuff camped in the same seat all day?

But I quickly heeded Wolf’s advice-slash-admonition to find a different group of people to sit with at each change–and the world opened up. If you went to C4 just for the tech sessions, it was worth the cost but you only got the tip of the iceberg. I met well-knowns and unknowns and learned about their products, their consulting and business development experience, and got to know them without pressure. I may not even remember their names right now (I’m terrible with names) but every one of those conversations built community.

I’m not going to claim WWDC lunches will ever approach C4’s, but you can incorporate a bit of the C4 experience into WWDC: Instead of getting together with the same group for lunch every day, take at least two lunches in the cafeteria area. Find a seat at a table with other people you don’t know, and strike up a conversation to find out who they are, what they do, where they’re from. I somewhat unintentionally did this last year, and I promise you: It will open your eyes.

If you’re stuck for icebreakers, here are some old reliables:

• “What did you think of the Keynote/’State of’ addresses?”
• “Did you catch yesterday’s Brown Bag session?”
• “What sessions are you looking forward to?” (earlier in the week)
• “What was the best session you attended?” (I love this one later in the week)

Asking where someone’s from or how many WWDCs they’ve attended tend to be short answers that don’t lead to conversations. Asking about shipping software can be great–people love talking about their products–but make the interest genuine so it doesn’t feel like an interview or “I’m only asking about yours so I can tell you about mine.”

Bring your business cards. After or during an interesting discussion, ask for one of theirs and offer one of yours. Periodically review the cards you’ve received during the week to refresh your memory of names and topics–you’ll be surprised how often you’ll run into those same people later.

Keep your own badge visible as much as possible to make it easy to approach you and ask about your company or just say “your name sounds familiar, did you…?”

For more advice on networking, check out Brent Simmon’s “Advice to new developers on networking”.

For more tips on WWDC, Jeff LaMarche’s “First Time Guide” contains nothing but tips I completely agree with. (Except my serious personal aversion to sleeping in public, including on planes.) Wait, I have one extra note: Plan to stow your gear before attending the Thursday Bash. I had my laptop backpack one year, and was miserable.

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There’s no way I’m going to fit into a tweet my feelings of Wolf Rentzsch’s announcement of the end of the C4 conference.

Last year was the first I’d managed to go to C4. I was glad I was attuned enough to the community to get into the short registration window; I was overloaded and overwhelmed by the conference itself and the people I met; I was desperately hoping to go again this year.

I guess I’m one of the silent apologists in regards to Section 3.3.1. I understand Apple not wanting to support backward compatibility going forward for a third-party dev environment, but I think it’s foolish of them to have called out something virtually unenforceable, and any claim of “crap apps” inherently generated from a Flash source only makes the current existence of crap apps on the App Store that much more ugly.

The speakers he brought in, the way he reacted to disrespect of a speaker, the statements he’s made in public and in person–Wolf’s decision seems perfectly self-consistent. He obviously feels Apple’s decision here affects him and the community more than I do. Even though our opinions differ, I respect his opinions and admire the strengths of his convictions.

Those same opinions and convictions gave C4 a unique character. In a time when there is a surfeit of excellent conferences to choose from, C4’s absence will leave a void.

I encourage all those who feel as strongly about Section 3.3.1 as Wolf does to start (or continue) to speak out about it. I may not be with you, but I’m not against you.

[super dealloc];

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I will be attending the Voices That Matter iPhone Developers Conference (attending, not speaking) here in Seattle on April 24th and 25th. If Gus Mueller and Brent Simmons can’t convince you to attend, I can’t imagine I’ll tip the balance by listing the reasons again, so I won’t try.

If for some reason you know who I am but we haven’t actually met yet, introduce yourself and let me buy you a drink. You should be able to stalk me best that weekend by following my personal Twitter account.

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I presented “Practical XML Parsing” at the September 10, 2009 meeting of Seattle Xcoders. While there is still a touch of the initially intended distaste for parsing XML with DOM, it evolved into more of an overview and brief introduction of NSXMLDocument and NSXMLParser.

After cleaning out large copyrighted material (part of a Justin Timberlake song on the title screen and a Star Wars snippet on the XQuery screen) and removing many of the Keynote build animations I like to use but which translate poorly to static images, I have made the presentation available. I didn’t record the audio, so the text may seem more terse than it really was.

• HTML export with most of the animations still intact
• Zipped archive containing:
  • Keynote 09 file
  • PDF export
  • XMLDemo source serving as the examples I showed

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The only time I ever attended MacWorld Expo, I was working behind the booth for a Mac retailer in the Bay Area. It was a long and tiresome time, without the opportunity to explore the other booths. (I believe RAMDoubler might have been the show hit, to give you a Dark Ages reference point.)

Even behind the booth, I got to meet a lot of interesting people. There were plenty of independent developers even then, and many of them had whimsical titles on their business cards; I seem to recall a “Grand Poobah,” but the one title that made the biggest impression on me was “Software Illusionist.”

I remarked on the title and the gentlemen replied to the effect of, “really, that’s all it is I do–present an illusion that people find useful.” That simple statement (probably mutated somewhat through the years in my memory) was revelatory for me.

It may seem trite to say “it’s all ones and zeroes” but at some level that is all we do as developers: Find ways to organize and present data patterns to users in a manner which doesn’t require a Beautiful Mind to interpret, or make it look like a ball bouncing around an artificial rectangular constraint on screen, or make it sound like music, or convert physical stimuli to a data pattern to present later. When the user buys into the illusion and doesn’t have to hear the creaking of the mechanism, the Software Illusionist has succeeded.

To that Software Illusionist, whoever you were (or hopefully still are): Because of you, to this day I am still compelled to make my software feel like magic. Sometimes it feels like a curse, but I still consider it a blessing.

Thank you.

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The prizes for Iron Coder at C4[2] have been announced: A MacBook Air loaded with more than $5,800 (MSRP) of software for first place and “just” the software for second! Gah! Now I really wish I’d been able to go so I could…watch the award ceremony.

That’s just software created by attendees. It’s an impressive Who’s Who of companies and applications, all sitting down together in a conference room for the weekend.

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