This year I somehow didn't feel like writing a post about every single day of WWDC (you can look at some pictures, though). It's Friday now, 4:30 pm and I'm on the Caltrain back to San Jose. It has been a fun week. Unfortunately a lot of the sessions were geared towards new iPhone developers, so they tended to be very basic. There were, however, still a lot of in-depth sessions which I really enjoyed.Snow Leopard will come with some great additions for us developers. Playing around with them and then actually talking to the very Apple engineers that built those things is priceless (actually it's not: you just have to buy a ticket). Catching up with people that I haven't seen for a year as well as meeting lots of new people is one of the nicest things about WWDC. It's a very friendly and helpful community.
I've also realized once more this week that iPhone and Mac development is a lot more fun than web development. It makes my eyes light up to be able to run my code "so close to the hardware". I love Ruby, it's a beautiful language, but optimizing your Objective-C code so that you get the last bit of performance out of this wonderful device that is the iPhone simply is a lot more exciting than writing web apps. The 4 years of writing ANSI C on OS/2 really pay off now: Having a deep understanding of C and of memory management is extremely valuable. Even if you mostly work with garbage-collected dynamic languages: Pick up a book and learn C. It will make you a better developer.
During this conference I also wrote my first native Ruby extension and decided that OpenGL ES is the next technology that I want to learn and master.
The beer bash yesterday was great. The food was good (but not as good as the last 2 years) and they got the band Cake to give a great concert for us. Good times. Two more points of critique: No reception on Monday night and no Espresso guy! What was up with that? I mean Apple must have been doing extremely well because of all of our apps that they sold through the AppStore last year, so this is not the time to get cheap and not offer such essential WWDC essentials like the Espresso guy!
Anyway, greetings to all the interesting people I had the pleasure of meeting and see you all again next year. I'll stay in California for another week: Vacation with my sweet wife!
