- Sunday, Aug 7th
6.27h - San Francisco, USA | I'm sorry, I fell asleep yesterday evening, dead tired after an exhausting day the jetlag really got me. Of course waking up at 6 as a result, but that's good because today is Stevenote day, and we have to get in line at 8. Continuing the story from yesterday, nope still no bag. But the website tracker tells me that it has arrived in San Francisco at least, and that it should be delivered today. Hopefully so, I didn't even have a jacket, luckily Phil from the BioCocoa team could lent me one. I met him at 7.30 at the Moscone west after a 15 min walk from my Hotel. We also teamed up with Redmar from the technical university of Delft who I met at the CocoaDevHouse meeting, Jorris from the Free University of Amsterdam, and Eric, a swedish guy working on fluid dynamics if I'm correct. We registered and received this year's goodies, a Veni, Vidi, Codi T-shirt and a really nice Apple Bag. This year it's a shoulder strap one, instead of a backpack (which I still prefer). I was lucky, as a guestspeaker I also received a cool silver/transparent Apple mug, now if I only drank coffee ;-) My badge says Guestspeaker and has a yellow stripe, which presumably gives me a higher level of access than others, not that I know why or when I should use that. -
After registration we went over to the Mariott Hotel to have breakfast as part of the start of Apple's Student Sunday. Together with a record 400 other students I attended the
morning sessions, which for me were quite cool. First up was Brian Fitzpatrick from Google who explained everything about Subversion. He works on the Subversion backend of Google Code, for me a very helpful overview as I'm probably the only one in the world who hasn't got much experience with version management software ;-) Brian was followed by Chris Hanson who talked about unit testing, which I still can't be so enthusiastic about as he is unfortunately, very nice guy though. And lastly famous cowboyman Aaron Hillegass from the BigNerdRanch took the stage to talk about custom data structures, a very cool talk which was certainly very helpful for me. He also launched a cool idea for an open source repository for reusable Cocoa code, now that would be really neat, I hope it takes off.
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Unfortunately I had to leave early for my meeting with Robert Kehrer in the Argent Hotel. It was amazing to take a look behind the curtains of WWDC. Literally the whole Argent Hotel was filled with Apple people, and the whole conference is organized in a Hollywood production type of fashion. Every room has a coordinator which manages the time, logistics, etc. After the rehearsal in the boardroom (very chique!) of the argent hotel and a nice chat, I went back to the Mariott just in time for the lunch of Student Sunday. I actually met a Portuguese guy Humberto from Porto who is quite an extraordinary inventor, enormously creative in all kinds of areas, fun to talk with. While the others started coding I concentrated a bit on my slides, and headed afterwards to the Moscone for the rehearsal. I heared that Steve was supposed to practice the keynote at the same time at the second floor, so no wonder security was extremely tight, unbelievable. For the rehearsal of the BioCocoa talk (there you have the 'secret' event) we went to the first floor where I met the organizing people, the other third party speakers and Bud Tribble, VP at Apple. The rehearsal went really well and afterwards we had fun talks with Fons Rademakers from CERN and Falko Kuester from the HIperWall project. Heading back to the Mariott I ran again into Phil, Redmar and Jorris who were just done with the Student Sunday talks. Before the career event would start at 6pm Phil and I headed over to Union Square to grab a drink in the afternoon sun.
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The career event was fun and better organized than last year. We had a lot of fun talking to the different people with a guy from the Northpole as the absolute height of the evening. Phil even got interested in joining the polar bears! We also met Louk Janssen from Apple who made my trip possible to the WWDC, always great to meet him. At the end of the evening we talked to Shaan Pruden, Director of Partnership Management, she is in large part responsible for a lot of the talks at WWDC, especially which third party speakers appear in the talks. She revealed a lot of what goes on behind the scenes of the WWDC, and I have deep respect for what she and her team is doing. By then the event was already at the end, and I went back to the hotel to get some sleep. Still, no suitcase, but at least it arrived in San Francisco... I guess that was relieve enough to almost immediately fall asleep ;-)
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Sunday