In early June I was lucky enough to be selected to make the pilgrimage to the 2017 edition of the Apple Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC. This annual conference is the premier event for developers within Apple’s ecosystem, attracting almost 6000 attendees over 5 days at the McEnery Convention Center in San José, California.
The highlights of the Keynote have been covered off in our post from Alt Conf, so I’ll focus more on what it was like to attend WWDC, and my key takeaways from a week in Apple Developer nirvana.
After years of watching the WWDC Keynote addresses at 5am on a Tuesday in New Zealand, Nic and I crossed the Atlantic to the sunny climes of California the weekend beforehand. This year is the 10 year anniversary of the iPhone, and anticipation was high for what would be revealed at the Keynote address.
We dropped by the convention centre the day before to check in and get our passes, and to get a taste of the excitement of the week ahead. As expected, Apple cut no corners fitting out the McEnery Convention Center, going as far as installing their own signage and even covering the floors of the halls with their own thick black carpet.
We’d heard stories of people queuing from 2am to get a good seat for the Keynote, and while we arrived at more congenial time of 9am there was still a pretty massive line out front. It was astounding the scale that this event was operating at, there were approximately 6000 people present for the keynote all seated in a single room ready for the big reveal.