Hello, I’m Kayoreena from Engineering Gateways!
Last week, Mercari members attended this year’s edition of the world’s hottest Apple tech event, Worldwide Developers Conference 2019 (WWDC 2019) Today I would like to report on their experiences.
The Worldwide Developers Conference is an Apple event held annually for developers. First is the keynote presentation, and then about a week of programs developers.
Since the event is for developers, software (iOS, MacOS, etc.) announcements are the main focus, and engineers participated in the event to hear about the latest trends of Apple.
We asked the Mercari iOS engineers who actually participated to see what it was like.
– Tim, how did the WWDC event compare with previous events?
– Mustafa, can you tell me the most impressive moment of this business trip?
One of my favorite aspects of the conference is the opportunity to speak 1on1 with Apple engineers and get consultation and an inside look of what is happening under the hood at Apple.
In addition, the most touching moment for me was when an Apple Creative Pro approached me, while I was having my lunch, and said “I’m sorry to interrupt, I recognized you and I just wanted to say thank you for your contribution to the community. We are proud to have you.”
Also, I’ve been really fortunate to be invited by Apple to both the corporate headquarters of Apple Inc., (Apple Park) and the Infinite Loop campus. I had many interesting conversations with Apple Engineers and an inside tour of the gorgeous campuses.
On the sidelines of the conference, I had the chance to visit the Stanford Apple Store to attend the App Lab Session that I am featured in. It was great to see so many students from Stanford attending this session.
Overall it was an awesome week and I am so excited to use all the new technologies we learned.
– Damian, did this experience at WWDC motivate you?
Since the morning of the day when I opened an email from Apple saying that I won a ticket I felt slowly increasing excitation.
WWDC is a big event where developers have a chance to increase their knowledge, discuss problems, new features, new framework with Apple’s engineers and meet developers from around the world! This made me feel extremely motivated to get as much as it would be possible from this conference.
Besides strictly technician presentations, I also attended to less technician events like Apple Design Awards, Designing Award Winning Apps and Games or Great Developer Habits.
Each of these events showed me that good apps are not only done by good code by also by good UI design, good UX design, by utilizing accessibility features, by good project management and by applying good habits to our work and our team.
All new features that have been introduced, all new people that I have met and great WWDC atmosphere made me feel very motivated to learn, code and create new apps. This was a fantastic time and I hope I will be able to attend WWDC 2020.
In this way, engineers at Mercari participate in tech events and conferences around the world to keep up with the latest developments in the industry. Join our team to learn new technologies and develop products!
See you again for more #MercariDays!
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That being said, WWDC 2019 was by far the most exciting one I’ve ever had the chance to attend! So many new things that I had been eagerly awaiting, and even some things I didn’t know I wanted were announced.
I’m extremely happy to have both Dark Mode for iOS, and UIKit for macOS. And I was completely floored when Apple suddenly announced that Xbox One and PS4 controllers now also work on iOS and tvOS.
Finally, it’s clear from this WWDC that we are on the cusp of a whole new generation of programming technologies from Apple, with the announcement of SwiftUI: something only made possible thanks to Swift, as well as Swift Package Manager finally about to hit the big leagues.
All in all, I had a fantastic week. I’m extremely excited with everything that was announced, and I can’t wait to see what sorts of features they’ve unlocked for my side projects.