The Greatest Week of the Year

Today was a great day. It was just good news after good news for me today, some of which I'm not at liberty to share yet, unfortunately. I'm just giddy. At the top of my list of good news was that WWDC was finally announced, and I can't put into words how excited I am for WWDC this year.

I think this is going to be a truly spectacular year. Last year was great. I had a wonderful time. I met great people, hooked up with some old friends I hadn't seen in a long time, and just learned a ton from all the smart people there, both from the attendees and Apple employees. But I think this year is going to be better. I really do. I wouldn't miss WWDC this year for the world.

Last year was very much a transitional year. There were a lot of people new to the Apple developer scene. In a sense, all of us were "new" as far as the iPhone Track was concerned and I don't think we really knew what the iPhone "development community" was going to shape up to be yet.

By now, I think the iPhone development community has coalesced, and it's managed to preserve most (if not all) of the things that have always made the Mac/Cocoa community so unbelievably awesome. Yet, it has developed a little different flavor. I'm really amazed at how cool the iPhone dev community is. The more iPhone developers I meet, the happier I am to be part of this. I mean, thirteen months ago, a lot of us were doing completely different things. I've met iPhone devs who came from backgrounds in every conceivable language, as well as many who had never programmed before. I've talked to people who've come from Flash and Flex backgrounds, PHP, Ruby, Perl, Java, JavaScript, C#, Visual Basic, C++, and other languages and combinations of languages. We're like the god-damned geek-version of the Brady Bunch, only with less girls and there's a lot more of us. And we're not all blond and blue-eyed. And... well, okay, that analogy's nowhere near as good as I thought it was, but you get the picture. We've come from dozens of different families and created a new family that's cooler than all the old ones (except for the Mac/Cocoa community, of course, which is equally cool).

You folks are awesome, and I'm really happy to be part of this with you all. I'm looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible come June.

I know not all of you can make it to WWDC. Believe me, I know. I had many years when I desperately wanted to attend but either couldn't justify the expense or flat-out couldn't afford it. It's hard to justify that kind of expense when you're doing this as a hobby, or part time, or if you've recently lost a job or even just if money is tight.

That being said: if you can swing it: go. It really is the most amazing week. You will learn what Apple's working on, get great presentations about a wide variety of topics, get opportunities to talk with the people who actually write the various Mac and iPhone frameworks you use every day. It's worth every penny. On top of that, there's no better place to meet the people inside of Apple and out who make up this world. It's like networking, but it doesn't feel like it. It feels like hanging out with friends, some of whom you just met.

I would give up every other trip I take in the year, including my family vacation (shh.. don't tell my wife that) in order to get to WWDC. The folks at Apple do a super job organizing this event. They entertain and educate us, and make us comfortable. It's amazing how "at home" you can feel sitting in a conference center with 6000 other people. I've never experienced anything else like it.