Arriving in San Jose

I got into San Jose late Sunday night and pretty much when straight to bed. The Fairmont has been amazing so far and is close to the conference which is nice.

Registration and Pre Keynote

Arriving at the convention center was something to behold, being my first major tech conference I was seriously overwhelmed by the whole experience. The outside wall for “Dub Dub” (the official nickname) was incredibly cool and if you watched it, it would light up in spectacular fashion. Getting registered was fun waiting with all the other developers. It is such a global crowd here that making friends in line was always interesting hearing where they were from and what they were working on. The Apple Store employees helping everyone were so high energy and hilarious throughout the day, l literally do not understand how they stayed so excited for the entire day. Once I got registered and received my badge, we left the building and re-entered a line for the keynote. I had gotten there a little bit before 6:30 so I ended up getting a pretty good seat. The wait to enter the Hall for the Keynote took about a total of 3 hours, but they feed us breakfast and was fun meeting more developers.

Keynote Time

The keynote itself was amazing, I think I can say for a lot of us there they revealed a lot more than anyone expected. From SwiftUI to the literally most insane desktop Mac ever, the Mac Pro, it was an amazing keynote. Seeing it in person for the first time was really dope. I have watched it every year since high school and it was amazing getting to actually be there this year. I have been playing with SwiftUI a little and already am getting very excited for this change. I think this is something that is going to drastically improve the quality of apps and the ease of development. The baked in accessibility is huge, for us at Cerner it is such an important item and having a lot of it out of the box is amazing. Following that, the watchOS changes were my second favorite. Standalone watch apps are amazing and I can’t wait to play with that this week. There are tons of great articles out there for a deep dive into all the announcements and if you want to hear more I would highly recommend checking those out on macrumors.com or 9to5mac.com.

State of the Union

After lunch and the awesome keynote, it was time for the state of the union. This is an address directed at developers over some of the more technical changes and additions Apple has been working on. Once again, there are some great videos and articles that dive into the specifics of the talks.

After Hours

After an awesome day, I was absolutely wiped but decided to go to a couple happy hours/parties before I called it quits. The SetApp/Paddle happy hour was pretty cool but was a pretty European crowd and didn’t talk to too many people. After that I rolled over to The Loop Bash which was dope. Made a couple friends and met up with some devs I follow on Twitter: Ben Sandofsky of Halide Camera and Conrad Kramer of Apple Shortcuts. I didn’t stay long, but was well worth the time. Can’t wait for Day 2!