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.

Phone and Laptop Prep

Earlier this week, I changed my phone from syncing with my desktop to syncing with the laptop. Last year I had an older laptop without much room on it for my music, so the iPhone was pretty much read-only during that time. Now I’ll be able to update any new podcasts as well as clear out those I’ve managed to listen to.

As long as I was losing all my application data by linking to a new library (I really wish there were a better transition available for that) I decided to finally bite the bullet and install the 3.0 OS. Beta 5 combined with a 1st Gen iPhone caused me quite a bit of grief to install, but I finally got it going and have been using it since.

I’ve trimmed my music playlist on the phone to make room for more videos to watch while traveling without having to pull out the laptop. My paper book for the week will be Cordwainer Smith’s “When the People Fell” which I’m already partway into, and I have Marcus Zarra’s “Core Data” epub in Stanza on my phone.

I’m somewhat paranoid of losing my phone in general, and the idea of leaving it behind in a swarm of almost identical phones at the conference only amplifies that fear. My normal desktop photo is my wife and daughter, but in a room of people who have just met me–and have never met my family–that won’t help. To improve chances of recovery, I have changed my desktop to my business card. It doesn’t fit perfectly, and I haven’t had the time to rearrange the graphics, but my name and email address are legible for anyone who might find my phone.

External Hard Drive

I installed the latest Snow Leopard developer release onto a portable drive, a Maxtor OneTouch Mini I’d bought a while ago. I haven’t been actively developing against Snow Leopard, so if/when we receive a new dev release at the conference, I will feel free to install over it.

Tip: If you are going to bring an external drive to run dev releases, reformat the drive in advance to use GUID Partition Table or it won’t boot your Intel Mac. That’s a really annoying thing to discover after you’ve gone through the OS install process.

Power

Hotel room outlets are a crap shoot. When you actually find outlets you can reach, they’re usually mostly occupied by appliances already. I always bring along my Monster Outlets-to-Go mini power strip. This thing is just one of those brilliant simple ideas, executed well.

During sessions, I don’t know that I’ll need much power. I’ve found that when it comes to note-taking, I’m more of a paper person than a laptop person. I’m not to the point of buying Moleskine notebooks, but I find writing easier and quicker to edit and annotate than a keyboard, and I focus more on the presentation itself. A paper notebook is also much less awkward to carry around and balance on your lap.

I am planning to carry a power adapter for my phone, though. Like Brent’s suggestion to stay hydrated, phone battery tends to be something you don’t think about until you’re critically low. Carrying a charger should allow me to grab a charge as needed.

Keep In Touch

I found Twitter to be invaluable last year for finding out about both sessions and social events. For those I follow in my closer social circle, I have their updates text message me; everyone else I can check as I wish. I just need to remember to disable the text messaging before I go to bed, then re-enable in the morning.

During the day next week, my Twitter stream will become somewhat cryptic: I tweet the session number and room I’m in (e.g. “101 Presidio”) when in a session; if you’re in the same session hall, you can then choose to look for (or avoid) me.

Feel free to follow me, but don’t be offended if I don’t follow you back. To limit the flow from Twitter, I have a general rule of trying to restrict myself to following people I have met in real life. Feel free to say “hi” and I’ll almost definitely follow you back.

I look forward to meeting as many fellow developers as possible this week, and wish you all a successful WWDC, however you define “successful.”

The Keynote (Continued)

Watching the Keynote from the back half of the hall is about the same as watching from home, only as it happens and with more crowded seating. It was an interesting experience and I don’t regret it one bit, but doubt I will worry about getting up early during any future WWDCs I may attend. Overflow seating should be just fine from now on, but I didn’t even want to pretend to be a Keynote-wearied veteran my first time out.

As for the content of the Keynote…

Hardware: iPhone 3G. Even though I usually avoid the rumor sites and discussions, it was fairly obvious that this was coming. I had proposed a bet elsewhere that “3G” would not be in the name, but none of that crowd took me up on it. I try not to be “that guy,” but for a short period there it was hard not to regret paying $200 more (x2, one for my wife) for my iPhone just two months ago, but I’m so much happier without the RAZR that I just can’t be upset. Not so sure that I like the new plastic back, and software features will be coming to my current phone, so I have no plans to run out and buy a 3G.

I was kind of hoping for a new laptop announcement, not so much because I expected one but because I was hoping for a “caught up in the moment” excuse to upgrade my PowerBook G4. I’m pretty sure I had the oldest machine there; when I could see the wireless network set aside for laptops, I got a self-assigned address so I assumed it was 802.11N-only and ended up connecting to the wireless for iPhones (sorry about that, other iPhone users). At one point I thought I saw a TiBook and tweeted that I no longer had the oldest machine at the conference, but in hindsight it was probably a Dell laptop with the lighter colored case edges.

iPhone software demos…iPhone development demo…the iPhone focus was understandable and expected, but I was there for desktop application development–not because I’m down on iPhone development, but because I have a desktop idea, not a phone idea, and I don’t plan to fight to be at the front of the App Store line without a strong idea that would stand out from the crowd.

MobileMe: I’ve been perfectly happy to pay $100 a year for a while now–almost solely for sync. Yes, I use iWeb and the iPhoto sharing features as they have evolved, but I’ve never really used the email. It looks like this is going to be a solid improvement. The name change neither bothers nor excites me; it’s simply understandable to appeal to current PC users.

And finally, Snow Leopard received almost cursory mention and a promise to talk about it later. For non-attendees seeing only the Keynote (and particularly those who spend much energy trying to glean insight out of every tea leaf) I could see that it might seem Apple has lost focus of the desktop in favor of the iPhone. It was slightly anticlimactic for me, too: In the back of my mind, I was hoping for some stunning new announcement to witness my first year. But as the week went on, I became more impressed.

Snow Leopard

I had heard rumors of the next release being code-named “Snow Leopard” (usually as “it’S No Leopard” <wink> <nudge>) and that it would be almost entirely performance enhancement. Sounds boring, to the point of unbelievability. But what they are actually doing is so much more than unrolling some loops and using updated algorithms. I intentionally took strong notes during the Keynote to identify what was not under NDA, but Apple has since announced more than they did at the Keynote. As a result, I feel a little unsure of what is acceptable to talk about so will err on the side of non-specifics.

Performance and Concurrency

Saying that Snow Leopard is “focused on performance” doesn’t convey the impact of what Apple is really planning. They’re aggressively moving to 64-bit support (almost) system-wide, and they have already announced Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL, two great mechanisms to enable developers to take full advantage of the multiple cores on both CPUs and GPUs. But there is a lot more: Much like Core Animation started on the iPhone and spread to 10.5, numerous optimizations made for iPhone will be incorporated in Snow Leopard, exhibiting the leverage of having your desktop and embedded systems share the same OS.

Other features being added are geared toward improving the user experience, but in terms of system response rather than introducing whizzy new interface design. It was fascinating to come to the realization of just how much Apple engineers are questioning everything in the system, even so far as shutting down the computer faster. Some features will require developers to write new code to take advantage of them, but with Apple planning to make these improvements to their own applications I think life will be filled with fewer spinning beach balls out of the box, making this a worthwhile upgrade for every user, not just those needing high-powered computation.

Sessions

The biggest problem with the sessions is the logistical problem of moving so many people around efficiently. Almost every session required a queue out front to get in, and were accompanied by requests to leave each auditorium as soon as possible when finished. The logistics of the crowd always gets grumbles from past attendees (last year’s attendance was “over 5,000″ and this year was 5,200), but I felt the staff did an excellent job of making it all smooth and compact while being friendly and courteous. Even past attendees complimented the staff on being much friendlier than last year’s staff.

As expected, the iPhone sessions were the star attractions, but I tended to avoid them in favor of other desktop technologies. I was shocked when a session on Bonjour networking was packed–it’s a ten-year-old technology now, it should be old hat–until I realized that it’s the preferred network discovery mechanism for the iPhone, too.

I attended a session every period one was offered, except for two end-of-the-day sessions so I could have time to head back to “home base” and return later. Sometimes I had to make a tough decision between two sessions I was very interested in (I look forward to videos of the sessions being available) and other times I just chose which current session looked least boring, but I was determined to take full advantage of session times.

Labs

Most people will tell you one of the most useful yet woefully overlooked aspects of WWDC is the labs. You can look up the scheduled times for certain topics of discussion, sign up for a time slot, and get one-on-one time with an Apple Engineer to answer your questions and/or give you feedback on your design.

Sadly, my development is neither in a state where I need help getting past a problem I’ve been banging my head against, nor far enough along that I feel I could expect any useful review feedback. Coupled with always being able to find a session I could find interest in, I did not attend any lab sessions. I do know of plenty others, though, who got great constructive criticisms on their UI, concise answers to questions, and even a full day (or more) of working through issues. I fully intend to shift my focus to labs if I attend next year.

Socializing

Ask any previous attendee, and you will almost universally be told the biggest takeaway from WWDC is the socializing and networking opportunities, and I completely agree. I may not agree with the occasional attitude of networking to the point of skipping sessions, but even at that extreme it holds true that there is the promise of videos of the sessions being available later–missed networking opportunities like these will not come again.

I am not a naturally gregarious person; I have always tended to fear that if I can’t follow up “Hi, my name is Paul” with a reason that person should be interested in me, I have only intruded on their time. But this attitude is borne of going out to meat-market bars or standing in book signing lines as a fan; WWDC is most certainly different. There are many Apple engineers there, and they are interested in what you are doing with their systems, how you felt about learning them, and what kind of wild hair-brained ideas you may have for them. Most of the attendees there are also interested in what you are doing, but they are a bit more likely to be distracted by trying to extract knowledge just as you are. At WWDC at least, you are really rewarded by putting yourself out there to give others the opportunity to find you interesting.

There are structured opportunities for socializing: Labs are a form of socializing, primarily with Apple engineers; the Welcome Reception on Monday evening (which I did not attend) and the the WWDC Bash on Thursday (which I did attend, and enjoyed the Barenaked Ladies concert greatly). But there are also less formally planned (by Apple, at least) events: The MacSB sfMacIndie soiree on Sunday night was excellent; I had planned to attend Buzz Andersen’s 5th Annual Party but got sidetracked by dinner and wine with my in-laws; Tuesday I attended a damn good A’s game with my brother-in-law (damn, I wish Seattle had a BART equivalent); Thursday was the aforementioned Bash featuring Barenaked Ladies which would only have been better if I’d figured out a way to drop my laptop bag somewhere beforehand.

Wednesday deserves special mention. The Sync Services team hosted a wine-and-appetizers dinner at District which I attended (after the Apple Design Awards) because sync fascinates me. I certainly felt like a little fish swimming in a big pond, with other attendees being from Mark/Space, Spanning Sync and Marketcircle, yet I still had no solid code (or even complaints) to discuss. Regardless, the team was gracious, generous and great to talk with. After that wound down, Twitter came through and let me connect with colleagues for a continuing night on the town.

Day-After-Drinking Tip: The Tempest bar shows up on credit card receipts as “Kubalas Kitchen”; when entering receipts later, it took me a while to figure out that I had not eaten two lunches–the 1:30 timestamp was am, not pm.

I had made Corporation Unknown business cards to hand out; I didn’t hand out a great deal of them since I didn’t want to feel pushy about something that had no product released yet. But I did tuck one of them into my badge holder during the sfMacIndie event Sunday, then toned it down to just a logo sticker the rest of the week. It got many positive comments and broke the ice a number of times; I recommend everyone do it (it’s not even my original idea, but I forget where the idea did come from).

As I mentioned before, I’m not naturally gregarious. I had a particular advantage to socializing this year by being fortunate enough to have gotten to know many other Xcoders, many of whom are successful indie developers. Not only did I get to know most of them better and met more of their co-workers, but to a fault, they were very generous in introducing me to yet other indie (already successful or just working toward it) developers. A (woefully abridged, I am sure) list of people I met, in something resembling chronological order:

• Tom Harrington of Atomic Bird
• Lemont Washington of Cocoa Labs Software
• Marco Pifferi of Tweakersoft
• Jacqui Cheng and Clint Ecker of Ars Technica
• Ruben Bakker of Uncomplex GmbH (maker of Mailplane)
• Mike Piatek-Jimenez of Gaucho Software
• AJ of Marketcircle
• Kevin Ballard of TildeSoft
• Joe Pezillo of Metafy
• Blake C. of Yet Another Mac Dev Blog
• Dan Messing of Stunt Software
• Mike Lee and Tristan O’Tierney of Tapulous (I already knew Mike from Xcoders before Tapulous, and I got to pick up my lemur!)
• Ash Ponders of United Lemur and Moneydance
• Daniel Jalkut of Red Sweater Software (whose MarsEdit I’m using right now)
• Paul Kim of Noodlesoft
• Guy English of Rogue Amoeba
• shook hands with bbum

The combination of networking and learning make WWDC an incredibly invigorating experience; I fully intend to return next year, and am working on clearing my schedule for C4[2].

This was my first time attending WWDC. I’ve wanted to for a long, long time but could never justify the expense for something that was effectively a software hobby. But with a newly solidified application idea, and a perfect storm of situations, I couldn’t resist on the year that turned out to be the biggest WWDC yet.

Perfect Storm, Part One: My sister-in-law and her husband live in San Francisco, they were going to be in town that week, and they were perfectly happy to have me stay with them during the week. That cut out the great big expense of lodging. Pacific Heights is not as convenient as the local-to-Moscone hotels, but it was really only an inconvenience when I needed to carry my bag during the Bash Thursday night instead of dropping it off in a hotel room. Staying with them will probably become a tradition as long as they will have me.

Perfect Storm, Part Two: Alaska Airlines offered a great flight price ($170 round trip). Even though it required departing Seattle early Sunday morning and returning Saturday night, that actually worked out perfectly due to Part One: I got the opportunity to have family brunch Sunday, and had time to take them out to dinner Friday night to thank them for their hospitality. (I can now highly recommend Argentine steak house El Raigon, and their wonderful selection of Malbecs.) I also had the opportunity to catch all of Friday’s sessions instead of having to cut out early to make it to the airport.

Perfect Storm, Part Three was a huge factor, but the briefest to describe: I was generously given permission by my boss to go into vacation time debt. Without that, I don’t think I could have justified the trip.

These factors all started lining up in the last days before early registration ended. I booked my held flight reservation from my iPhone late Thursday night, after an Xcoders meeting; I purchased my WWDC ticket and ADC Select membership (another first) on the last day of early registration. I certainly felt like I just made it under the wire when they announced the conference was sold out.

The Keynote

Since this was my first WWDC, I figured I had to bathe in the Reality Distortion Field and see the Keynote. I overslept and woke up at 4:30 instead of my planned 3:30, figured out which bus was running at that hour only to miss it by less than a block, and ended up walking the entire way. I was in line just before 6:00, about halfway down Minna (before the first “everyone get to know your neighbor better” compression of the line).

Keynote Line Swag Tip: If you’re interested in swag (t-shirts, MacTech magazines and more) while in line, staying to the street side of the packed-in line will increase your chances of not being ignored.

Stand in line, eventually get let into Moscone. I had already registered on Sunday, so I followed the majority of the crowd up to the second floor “holding pen” (my term; I never actually heard the staff call it that) where we were told that we were guaranteed to get into the main auditorium. Comfortable in the knowledge I didn’t need to hold my spot, I made a quick restroom break.

Keynote Line Coffee Tip: The Starbucks right near Moscone is insanely packed at this time. Luckily my walk had earlier taken me past an uncrowded Starbucks on O’Farrell, but also try the Peet’s at 2nd and Mission.

I stopped paying attention to time; no easier way to get frustrated than watching a clock while waiting. After some period of time, we were led up to the third floor and another “holding pen” area in the hallway. After another period of time, we were let into Presidio, the largest available conference hall, where I quickly realized that unless I wanted to fight my way into the first ten rows it would look the same from any other row in the hall. So I casually settled into a seat about four rows behind the left side projection screen and awaited my first in-the-flesh Keynote.

If you have read this far, I apologize for the cliffhanger but this post has already become longer than expected. I will follow up on the rest of the week soon.