WordCamp and Student Sunday

For students, this year’s WWDC has already started yesterday with “Student Sunday”. But let’s start with WordCamp on the day before, because I didn’t have time and/or network access to write about it.

WordCamp was a little conference of Wordpress users and makers in the Swedish American Hall. As some of you know I’m a Textpattern user, so I don’t exactly fit in the target audience of a 1-day conference on Wordpress. Bur I’ve been there anyways and besides getting my free t-shirt and some free food, I listened to some interesting free talks. (Did I mention that the good ol’ days of free everything from companies with a website don’t seem to be that far away anymore?) First I listened to some talks about using Wordpress as a CMS and Wordpress on high performance sites (I wasn’t there for the whole day), but the best presentation was Tantek Çeliks talk about Microformats. If you’re remotely interested in web technologies, and want to know about the “next big thing” have a look at their website. I used them heavily on my diploma thesis, so I knew most of the stuff Tantek was talking about, but it was great to see in person what I only knew from PDF slideshows. There was a Wordpress party afterwards that we missed unfortunately (sorry, Tim), because we got the location totally wrong. But anyway, it was a nice little conference.

Today started with “Student Sunday”, Apples annual Student gathering on the day before WWDC. Continental Breakfast for Apple seems to be just coffee or tea with nothing to eat (it was different last year…) but the great lunch totally made up for that. The event was located in the Mariott hotel across the street from the Moscone West. It started with some google guy whose name i ironically have to google, but I’m writing this offline without internet access… Anyway, he is the guy behind Subversion and gave an interesting talk about version control. He was followed by an apple engineer, whose name I also have to google, who introduced us to unit testing, a topic I am new at but that will certainly be used in the stuff i’ll do in the future. The next speaker’s name (and his hat) I remembered, it was Aaron Hillegrass, author of a great Cocoa Book that I can highly recommend and speaker of the great CoreData introduction at last year’s student sunday. He talked about what he called “unsexy stuff”: data structures in Cocoa. He want’s to start a little “revolution”, and I don’t know if I can blog about that, so until I find out if I can do, you have to live with the suspense. But he’s basically starting a project that can make the life job of many cocoa programmers a little bit easier.

After lunch, Aarons hands-on session was cancelled because he didn’t get the time he needed for it, so after some additional waiting time there was a presentation about Apple and student developers in China. In very short terms Apple does a lot to encourage chinese students to do Cocoa projects, and has some interesting relationships with chinese universities. I fact, they do a lot more than they do with German universities…

The next talk was Michael B Johnson, Pixars Motion pictures Lead (I’m mot really sure about his exact job title, I’ll have to google that too), who talked about how Pixar works, and how he and his (Macintosch) programs support the way Pixar makes movies. Very entertaining and interesting talk, but after having seen the exactly same talk the year before on the WWDC lunch sessions and again in a special session on Pixar, it’s starting to get a little bit old. Half of the audience were there last year, so I think Apple should have had a motivational talk that was new to everybody. Well, at least his last part about “what someone should have told me when I was a student” was new and good.

Speaking of well-known talks: Wil Shipley of Delicious Monster, who gave the legendary talk about independent Mac developers on last year’s student Sunday was back for a spontaneous Q&A session. Without any script he did a very good and entertaining presentation of his views on some Mac development topics.

So, now you know what that mysterious “Student Sunday” is like: It’s great and interesting if you attend it for the first time, but if you’ve already been there, you might already know one thing or the other. But even then it’s still worth attending, and it’s only the beginning of what promises to be an exciting week…

(I’m now leaving for the keynote after typing this at 6am. I’ll proof read this posting later, just take it as a “beta”. There’ll be pictures, too. Go Steve! ;-) )