I spent most of last week at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. WWDC one of those things I do every couple of years and the first question I always get when I mention this is ‘Why?’ As a Java developer whose only Mac coding is spare-time hobbyist playing around, what's the value to me of going to an Apple developer conference?1
The obvious answer is ‘because I learn stuff’. I can't tell you exactly what because of the blanket NDA that covers everything after the Keynote address, but I can give some idea of where I'm coming from. I've always felt that attending was valuable to my education as a general purpose nerd, but I think the reason only really became clear to me in the [Redacted] session when Bertrand Serlet described how Apple [Redacted].
I'm not going to mention any particular companies or products here, but one thing that seems to happen far too often at major keynote tech conferences is The New Direction. Some great new programming language, environment or set of APIs are unveiled as the great new way that you are going to write software in the future, but it quickly becomes obvious that the people selling you this technology simply aren't using it themselves for anything important.
One of the cool things about WWDC is that for the most part, the libraries and APIs that are unveiled to developers are the stuff that Apple has been using to develop the software that runs, and runs on the next version of Mac OS X, and now feels are mature enough to make available to third party developers. The talks are littered with examples of how a new API allowed some team to delete this much boilerplate code, or allowed them to implement one of the new features showcased in the keynote this much faster.
It makes a refreshing change. It's far more interesting for me to sit in a session about Grand Central Dispatch and learn how it has already made some application I use every day substantially more efficient, than it is to learn that some new API is conceptually better, works really well in this demo, but the vendor haven’t themselves written any shipping code that makes use of it.
So one thing WWDC provides me is a showcase of ways in which a company that controls a suite of applications, the OS those applications run on and the developer tools used to develop those applications solves some pretty substantial engineering problems, and how it turns those solutions into publicly consumable APIs.
Which, I think, is pretty damned useful.
1 Beyond simple fanboyism, which I must admit still plays a non-trivial part in my decision to attend, and the fact that I seem to be in San Francisco at around that time on other business anyway.
