WWDC24 Prologue

I have been doing iOS development for a few years now, and visiting the WWDC became one of my bucket list item.

During COVID there were significant changes introduced, for example the in person event got much shorter. Now we are talking about a reception on Sunday afternoon, a whole Monday, and half day of Tuesday. The ticket is still based on a lottery system, but now it is free, so you don’t need to pile nice amount of dollars for attendance. Still on the positive side: online consultations made much easier to reach an Apple engineer, and get valuable insights “from the comfort of your home”, as the ad says. I managed to have those consultations twice in the last 2 years, and I would absolutely encourage everyone to try to apply and attend to one.

Having my first WWDC after COVID is still a great experience in my opinion, although I have heard other participants, attending before COVID, that the event moved into more a socializing direction than being more technical. I am still waiting for the main event at the time of writing, so I can revert back to this point after the whole week.

While this year I somehow managed to win the ticket for the Apple Park Event, I would even come, in case if I had missed it. There are a lot of other events, which are organized by the community, you can check out at Apple (https://developer.apple.com/wwdc24/community/), or on Paul Hudson’s GitHub repository (https://github.com/twostraws/wwdc), beside or after the official Apple event. So far I attended a meetup called Core Coffee, which was really nice, and met a lot of developers (and few Apple engineers). Some of them I have already known from the iOS Developer Happy Hour (https://www.iosdevhappyhour.com). Then went to the old Apple Campus to have the reception party, collect the badges (and got free dinner ;)).

Finally here are few tips, if you are planning to visit WWDC in the coming years.

⁃ Try to arrive at least one day before the event. As I mentioned the welcome reception, where I collected my badge for the main Apple event was held on Sunday, so I was lucky that I arrived on Saturday.

⁃ There are plenty of events, but you need to be quick, usually tickets are sold out very quickly.

⁃ I managed to find a hotel quite close, walking back from the Infinity Loop campus took me 35 minutes, to the Apple Park it will be 20 minutes. However, keep in mind that the distance in US is much bigger than what we used to in Europe.

⁃ I was really afraid of the jet lag. However, it seems there are 2 things that helped me enormously: First is to get enough sleep (I slept from 7PM to 6AM on Saturday), the second thing is the Melatonin, which helped me to go back to sleep after my body decided to wake up (at 3AM :/).

⁃ I was planning to travel from the San Francisco Airport to Santa Clara by Caltrain. However it turned out that Caltrain is not operating on the day I arrived. Probably worth to check your route before, or even better: Might be a bit expensive, but much more effective to use some Uber or Lyft to get to your hotel. I paid $60, but getting to my hotel in 35 minutes instead of 1 hour 54 was priceless.

Can’t wait to see what’s going to happen tomorrow (or today, based on your time zone ;))!