Panel

Pete Hodgson (twitter github blog)
Rod Schmidt (twitter github infiniteNIL)
Ben Scheirman (twitter github blog NSSreencast)
Charles Max Wood (twitter github Teach Me To Code Rails Ramp Up)

Discussion
 DevChat.TV Indiegogo Campaign
 0...

 

I forgot you guys are time travelers over there.

Hey everybody and welcome to Episode 7 of iPhreaks! This week on our panel, we have Pete Hodgson.

Good morning from sunny San Francisco!

Rod Schmidt.

Hello from Salt Lake City!

And Ben Scheirman.

Hello from 2 hours in the future!

Whoa!

[Laughs] It only feels like one hour in the future from here.

Yeah. I guess you're more advanced than Pete is.

There we go.

Whenever I'm talking to Australians, I always ask them what tomorrow's going to be like for me. [Laughter]

Anyway, I'm Charles Max Wood from DevChat.tv. One announcement before we get going, I've set up an Indiegogo campaign to get us a little bit more cohesive website that gives a lot of features that fans of this and other shows have asked for. So if you would like to donate, I would really appreciate that. Just go to iphreaksshow.com/indiegogo and we would really appreciate your contributions.

So you're going to go back in time and make that URL work for listeners?

Yeah!

Awesome!

This is the time travelling episode.

Yeah.

Absolutely. Alright well, let's jump in and talk about "WWDC". I know historically it's sold out in a matter of days, and then in a matter of hours, and this time it's sold out like 2 minutes?

70 seconds.

70 seconds!

Is there an official --

Even though the sales were sold out, so many people had tickets in their shopping cart that later got calls. So I don't know if you can really count that number, but for the most part, it was the fastest sell out ever.

Yeah.

I think it definitely sold out fast, I think we agree on that.

Yeah. We had 4 of us at my company trying to go, and 2 of us got tickets and 2 did not. And then, one of them had an error during sign in so like he couldn't even sign in to even get started; the other one got crash on check out. She actually got a call later on that night saying "Hey, we're going to send you an email blah, blah...and go get your ticket tomorrow or something, but you still have one". So that was good that they were able to reach out to people because there's so many people on Twitter who were just like 'fuming mad' that like "What else can I do? I'm sitting here in front of the computer at the time you tell me..." you're at the whim of whether or not your clock is synchronized with Apple's, and that you're route to the internet as faster than everybody else is, and everything else.

I read someone's blog post who had a podcast. They were saying that essentially at this point, it's a lottery and they should just make it a lottery and just, for a week before the tickets go on sale, everyone can register for "I'm interested in ticket", and then they just pick it out.

Yeah. At least you would be upfront about it.

Yeah!

And people wouldn't stress out about things. I also read an article from (I can't remember where it was) but they're talking about what if somebody has like a physical disability and can't click and type as fast as everybody else, like they would be out. And that's just kind of unfortunate that they have this stressful 2-minute situation where everybody's trying to get a ticket and can't.

Now, I understand The Moscone Center holds a whole lot more people than they sell tickets for. And I've heard some people say that it's so that they can -- that's the number of people that they can kind of give the experience they want to give to. I haven't been to WWDC, so I really have no idea how true that is.

I can buy that.

Yeah, I think it would ruin it. There's already so many people, and while it would be good to accommodate more people, just finding people that you know talking, making connections, and stuff like that, it becomes hard the larger conference gets, and the lines are really long. I don't know. It just seems like it would be really -- it's already the largest conference I've ever been to -- if they were to add more people in there, it just seems like it would be difficult to maintain. Like for instance, they do sessions like any other conference and there's going to be some sessions that are more popular than others. And what do you do for those sessions where there's not enough chairs in the room? Right now what they do is they have a repeat session somewhere else. So they would end up having even more repeat sessions of the same topics.

Or, they do like the overflow thing that they do for like Keynote where they have like the main room and then the overflow room where you kind of go into the -- yeah, just watch the video live.[Chuckles]

Yeah. So there's this ongoing debate of like when should you show up for the Keynote. And people start showing up like maybe 9pm the night before to have to be first in line.

Oh, geez!

I'm not that crazy. So last year, it's my first year, and we were talking about "Okay, when should we go?" and we decided to just kind of wake up, have breakfast, and walk over there, and we get there when we get there. We walked all the way around Moscone, like we decided to walk around counter clockwise, and we walked around 3 sides of the building to get to the end of the line.

Yeah, I did the same thing.

But, you got to see a lot of people, and that experience in the line was pretty awesome. And me and my colleague, Kevin Lee, we were the last people let in to the main session room - the auditorium that holds like 3,000 people or something. And there was me in, and the last ones and everybody else decided to go to the overflow room.

I was in the overflow [Laughs].

I have to say that my seats for the Keynotes have been pretty darn good; I sit here in my chair and watch them online -[Laughter]

I see everything! It's real nice.

Yeah, it was difficult for me to see in the back. I didn't have a good seat or anything, but you can say you did it.

Yeah. So what kinds of sessions do they have at WWDC?

The funny thing is this: they have a really awesome iPhone app companion that actually is a good experience. I've never really had an iPhone app that a conference be a great tool, but this one is like an integral part of the experience. And they have this schedule that you can sort of mark your favorites on, and then it builds you your schedule, and has a map, and there's some like professional photographer going around taking photos. The funny thing is this, when you arrive, all the sessions say "To be announced…to be announced…to be announced" because it's all secret stuff. And so until you get there, until the day of the conference, it's when they start releasing like what it's about. Last year, one of the big unveils was UICollectionView. And so that, all of a sudden, that came out on, I guess on Monday during the conference, and there is a handful of sessions on UICollectionView that you could go to. There's just a lot of them; there's stuff on Xcode, there's stuff on the BuildTools.

It tends to kind of fall into two categories. That stuff like "We're going to teach you this new API that we unveiled" during the Keynote or mentioned during the Keynote, and then there's, sometimes, there's kind of “repeat kind of stuff” that's like maybe slightly kind of refreshed, but haltered debugging Xcode or beginning with CoreAnimation, or something like that. So normally, there's like 2 kinds of categories that was like "Learn this new..." -- well, that's the way I look at it anyway -there's like "Learn this new API or learn this new technology that you're going to need to use", or just the standard kind of "Get better at iOS or OS X technology". But they're all technical, right? Like I don't think, apart from their lunchtime slots, there's no fluff; I think there's probably code in every single presentation.

And who gives the presentation? Is it Apple's staff?

Yes, it's all Apple all the time. There's no non-Apple vendors, there's no non-Apple presentation.

There's some like Lightning Talks and stuff they've done in the past.

Oh, yeah!

I think they're pretty clear of telling you that they're not Apple employees, but I've heard of people like indies and stuff speaking. But they're definitely like side sessions. I certainly didn't attend any of those last year.

I guess the lunchtime slots, they have like guest speakers and stuff who are like indie developers or someone from Star Trek.

Yeah, last year I got to see J.J Abrams --

Oh, cool!

His story was really cool! And I missed (what's his name?) LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow...I missed him. [Laughter]

And then there was another one that I missed, it was about a Storytelling App, but I can't remember the name of it. But my friends said it was really really inspiring.

I think that was the same; wasn't the Storytelling App LeVar Burton's thing?

Oh, maybe it was.

Yeah.

Yeah, I missed it. You have to plan in some nap time during Dub Dub because -[Laughter]

You just go, go, go and there's so much material to take notes on. And right afterwards, people are like "Alright, where are we going to go eat? Where are we going to go drink?" there's parties every single night, and you will never have a down moment. And so when you're getting back to your hotel room at midnight, at 1 am, then you're going to start again in the morning at 8, it's just -- it's a whole week of that. You should probably plan on missing some sessions so you could go relax for a bit.

I tell people to do that at most conferences I go to, anyway. Rod, have you been to WWDC?

Yeah, it's been a while. The last one I was at was when they announced the Intel switch-over, which was 2004, 2005, or 2006, somewhere around there.

It was forever ago.

Yeah.

And what was your experience? Do you think it's changed much over the last 7, 6 years?

Oh yeah, that was before they announced iOS. And since they've announced iOS, that's when it's gotten crazy. So, I don't think it was a problem at all getting tickets back then.

Yeah, definitely not 2 minutes. The amount of iOS content, obviously, is more than zero. But like relatively -- well, maybe that's just because I'm more interested on iOS stuff -- but, it seems like most of the talks that Dub Dub nowadays are iOS; it's not that much Mac-specific stuff.

I've kind of gotten that impression, too. Do they publish all of the sessions? Or, just the Keynotes? Because I know you can go back and re-watch the Keynotes, but --

Yeah, all of the sessions, if you've paid for your Apple developer account, you can go to developer.apple.com/wwdc, there's a link in there to download the videos from past years. And that will take you into iTunes, but you have to start with logging in with your Apple account. There's just so many sessions. All of them are high-quality, and usually, this is the type of material that you're not going to get from reading documentation sometimes, or reading like the header comments in a .h file. There's just another aspect of insight that you can get as to what Apple was thinking when they wrote this API; what is its intended use. Last year, I really got a lot out of the In-App Purchase, the Auto-Renewable Subscriptions stuff. This year, I have taken the time to sit down and actually do some of it. It is really really complicated; I've read the docs a number of times, but I keep going back to that video. Because the video that I watched -- I mean I watched in person then watched the video later -- there's stuff in there, there's advice that just somehow doesn't come through in the documentation. So, it was definitely really valuable to go see.

Now, when you go out there, do you usually try and stay in the hotel close to Moscone Center? Or, do you try and kind of get away from the crowd a little bit? How do you approach those?

I was close enough where it was walking distance that took about 10 maybe 12 minutes or something to walk there, but it was uphill on the way back [chuckles]. And if you have to keep walking back and forth, that gets a little old; I've read numerous people say advice "Just get a hotel nearby if you can". This year, my hotel is going to be a lot closer than the last year. But, I would say the hotels are expensive. So bunk up with somebody, or do something on Airbnb where you can find an apartment or something, where you can share with a few people, so that you can get the cost down a little bit.

Yeah, it's like they know a whole bunch of people are coming.

Yeah. Little did I know, there's actually WWDC like hotel reservation hotline, and they will find you a hotel nearby, and you tell them what you want. To me, it sounded like a big scam at first. But then I went in and saw that it was actually listed on the WWDC page if you click on Travel, there's a

hotline, and they will organize rooms. They actually have reserved blocks specifically for that; you have to book through them. So I called the hotel that I wanted to stay at and they said they had no availability, and they gave me the number of the hotline and I went and double check that on the website. And it's true enough; I could go to the travel hotline and get a room reserved.

Hah!

So that way, you don't have to call like 10 hotels; they can just do it all for you.

That's pretty sweet. That's nice as well if you don't know San Francisco and you don't know where the hills are. [Laughter]

Yeah, Google maps doesn't do a good job of showing you that.

Or, you don't know where like the sketchy parts of SoMa are because that neighborhood it's like it's in stripes like a block, like one street is really nice and then one street is super sketchy and then the next street is super [inaudible].

Yeah, I walked through many of those neighborhoods last year and I was like "Yeah, I don't belong here. I should probably skewed on over a few blocks".

To clarify, San Francisco is a very very safe place. It's like, some of those streets are sketchy and that you might see a scary hairless person, but you're not going to like...I don't know. I've never felt threaten for safety around that neighborhood. It's just sometimes, you might have like a conversation with someone you don't necessarily have a conversation then.

Interesting. I would assume, Pete, that you just stay at home [laugh].

Yup! Yeah, I don't get a hotel [Laughs].

Another really awesome thing is -- I did mention earlier that it’s the biggest conference I've ever been to -- it's the one conference I've ever seen that actually gets WiFi right. It's amazing to me how they can get all these people on the internet. And they have these TVs that show you, I don't know exactly what it is, but it's like a network spectrum analyzer that shows you something at the WiFi --

It's network operations porn, that's what it is.

Yeah. [Laughter]

And, it works! And people are pretty courteous for the most part. They have a bunch of wired connections in the cafeteria, and so if you want to actually go download -- they announce new tools, and probably we're going to hear the announcement of iOS 7 and we'll be able to download the beta right away -- everybody wants to do that; that's like 500 megs or something. And if everybody does that on the hotel WiFi, it's not going to work. So you can actually sit down, plug in, eat some lunch, and wait a few minutes and have the new tools downloaded. I did that last year. I put iOS 6 on my main phone, which is kind of a risky thing to do, but it worked out okay.

I think they must like locally cache the data bits or whatever because I remember someone saying it downloaded just like ridiculously, like faster than when you are back in college and you are like directly connected to the background.

[Chuckles] Yup.

It's kind of funny because they do have this amazing WiFi, and then during the Keynote two years ago, Steve Jobs kind of told everyone off for using their WiFi. The reason that Keynote had WiFi issues was because everyone was using MiFi because they just assumed that the WiFi wouldn't be good enough so everyone had their MiFis turned on, and then you've got like 10 bazillion different kind of competing radio signals. [inaudible] are just all used to that; use MiFi. If they've all used the conference WiFi, that would have been fun.

I remember that, and I remember people talking about it afterward. It's really interesting that they really can have that many people there and not have it totally crap out.

Yeah. No, I wonder if they have like some 'someone has done it right', of how they do it because it would be. I mean I'm definitely not a hard way guy, so lots of it would be away of my head. But it would be interesting to read how they pull that off because it does seem like a very hard problem to solve; to have that many people, all of them with like 7 devices turned on. [Ben laughs]

And all of them like downloading huge --

Yeah. I mean they'll tell you "Don't download the bits on WiFi, please". That's why they provide -you go sit down for lunch and there is a network jack right there like ready for you to plug into. So they make it easy enough; people are just naturally just use the wire because it's going to be faster anyway.

Yeah.

I'm wondering if we could go through -- Jeff Lamarche puts out a First Timer's Guide -- maybe we could just go through this real quick.

Yeah! That sounds like a great idea to me.

It's got 30 points, so maybe we could just hit a few of them; I'll go and paste this in the show notes.

Why don't we just go over the ones that you guys think are the most critical ones for people to understand?

Okay! Number 1 it says “Arrive on Sunday or Earlier”. I arrived Sunday evening, and so I missed a lot of the first parties or whatever, which wasn't such a big deal, but I missed the Night of Meat, which I don't want to do again this year [laughs].

Night of Meat?

Night of Meat.

M-E-A-T, Meat?

Yup! It's like Fogo de Chao or something. I don't know if you've been to a restaurant like that, but basically, these Brazilian gauchos will come around with swords and steak and they'll cut it off onto your plate and you can have as much as you want; it's just a glorious event for carnivores. Anyway, so they have this helps a charity, you pay your way, part of it is paid by sponsors, and then the like half of what comes in is charity or something like that. But that will fill out quickly, and that happens on Sunday. So, I'm looking forward to go into that.

So, what kinds of events they have? It sounds like they have the Night of Meat, or whatever, but are there other events that are sort of important to be at? Or, are most of them kind of like this where it's fun to be at, you get plenty of food and plenty of (for some people) plenty of alcohol, and you just have a good time?

Yeah, usually people arrange a bus tour to go visit the mother ship; go to Apple and go to the company store, if possible, and just take a look. I may do this as well because I'm getting in early enough on Sunday.

Do you ever think to do, if you're down in the Presidio, is go to the Computer History Museum in San Jose? Definitely worth doing, if you're going down in that direction. Maybe that could be a pick!

Yeah! I've never done that, but I will have some time that weekend so maybe I'll make it a point to do that.

You should do it. Everyone who's vaguely geeky who's done that has always said it's super fun little trip down San Jose.

Last year, there was a Heroku meetup where Eloy Duran came in from Amsterdam; he came to talk about CocoaPods. And I just got to meet a lot of people that I had only talked to online before there; and it was cool just to see the Heroku offices and have a beer with bunch of famous geeks.

Nice.

That was fun. TestFlight service for doing ad hoc builds for formable apps, they were giving out free Vietnamese Banh mi sandwiches and T-shirts; you just have to show up and they would chat with you for a minute and you get a sandwich and a T-shirt. That was the spiciest thing I've ever [laughs]...me and my friend were crying; it was so spicy, but it was tasty. I can't remember the name of the food trip, but you might know the one I'm talking about. It's like An Nam, or something.

Yeah, I know the one you eat. I don't know what it's called, but I do know the one you eat [laughs]. Have you, Ben, or rather of you guys been to the official like Apple party that, I think, it's Thursday night? Because I kind of skip that...

Yes.

I just kind of assume that it would be lame, but that's because I'm a total, I don't know, counterculture snob, or something. [Laughter]

What's that like?

Usually they bring in a good band, like I think when I went, they brought in The Killers; lots of wine and beer, and good food.

Last year, they had the Neon Trees -- I knew I had heard of them before; you've probably heard their hit song -- and Scott Forstall came out and gave a little speech about "It's been a great week, yadda yadda yadda..." and introduced the band. There's beer and food, and it was fun! It was a concert and you're like 50 feet from the band, so it was pretty cool. I plan on going again this year.

So not lame?

No.

Yeah, I liked it. [Chuck laughs]

Plus, it's kind of like your chance to wind down because Friday, it's only like a half day; I think you go to one session in the morning and then it's over. And so most people kind of disperse and there's some strugglers that like go out to dinner or something on Friday, but Thursday is kind of like the farewell. And kind of the point of being there is to be social, so you should meet people that you don't know or talk to people; you're going to make friendships and professional relationships that hopefully will last. So, you should take the opportunity to do that if you go.

Yeah, I think that's definitely a really good point. That's the truth of conferences in general, particularly WWDC, like the Apple community is very open and people like meeting each other. So, take advantage of it and meet people and start conversations with people.

One of these points on this First Timer’s Guide is “Taking Notes”, and he mentions two apps for collaborative note taking, which I have not done yet, but I may try this year because I'm really bad at taking notes. Because when something that interest me, I put down my pencil or stop typing and I'm like [laughs] I'm really focused intently on what they're saying, and then I have to scramble and type it. So I think to benefit from the community, just sort of contributing to all the sessions. And then you could also take a look at notes for sessions you didn't have a chance to attend because there's going to be times when two things are going on at the same time and you want to see both, but you can't. So if you are bringing a friend, don't just go with your friend to each session; split up so you guys can cover both then chat about it later.

One strategy that a friend of mine who was at Dub Dub years, which I'm not sure if it's a good one or not, it's kind of interesting: he would not go to the session. If there's like multiple sessions going on and there was one that was like "Oh!" I don't know, his app is like uses maps a lot and there's a map session. He would actually skip the map session because he's probably going to watch on video afterwards, anyway, and go to one that's like something he probably wouldn't bother to watch normally. So he go to a talk on Advanced Memory Management, or like something that some iOS API that he hasn't used before, and isn't sure if he's going to use. He would go to that talk just because that's like a good option detail, learn something that you wouldn't get around to learning of OS and kind of expand your horizons a bit. So, the thing is kind of an interesting approach to choosing which talk to go to.

Yeah, I've definitely watched the videos even for the sessions I went to just because the quality of these presentations are so high and you're going to get information here that's like crucial to your career. One of the things that I've had to do after working on a streaming radio is dig into a framework that I just otherwise wouldn't have touched, and that's AVFoundation. And AVFoundation, the docs are, I'd say above average for like general framework documentation, but they're definitely below average for Apple's own standards, I think. I think that in order for you to get a full understanding of AVFoundation, there's not a whole lot of places that you can go like Stack Overflow and the Dev Forums. The documentation, in my case, wasn't enough for me to fully understand how to tackle the problem I needed to solve. So, I went back and watched previous years' videos on AVFoundation. And then when I went last year, I went to all of the AVFoundation's sessions, even the ones that were related to video because AVFoundation design works for audio or video, so I just had to ignore the part then when they talked about video. So definitely, these sessions are really dense with information; you're probably going to want to go back and watch them again.

The other thing that kind of touches on that is the Labs. I think you said in the previous episode that you ended up going to Labs and talking to the AVFoundation guys. I think that the Labs is like totally the jewel of Dub Dub DC for me, like being able to go and ask questions and keep asking questions until you understand it or until you've got some kind of understanding of what's going on; it's super duper valuable. My advice is to kind of prepare ahead of time. What's something that I didn't do was write down; in the weeks coming up to WWDC, what I should have done is write down all the questions I had so that when I was in the Labs like sitting next to the Xcode engineer, I could pull out my list and say "Okay, cool! I also had a question about this, this, and this..."

Yeah, that's a really good point: is to come prepared. I came with somewhat nebulus questions, and after the week was over, I was like "You know, I really should have had like few examples..."

For some blab or something...

Yeah. I've prepared sample that I could say like "Okay, this is what I have and it works, but I really want control over this aspect of it", or "I'm experiencing this type side-effect", or whatever. It was difficult for me to just show them my exact app because there was too many things going on; I needed to distill it into something that they could understand quickly and I could point directly to "I tried that and this is what it looks like, and I don't like that. So maybe I'm doing it wrong or it's just the way or --"

And it's kind of like you just have to put yourself in their shoes because they're developers as well, so it's the same as a user coming to you with a bug report. And if a user comes to you with this kind of nebulus like "I'm pretty sure it doesn't work", "Oh, let me try and reproduce it", "Oh, I can't remember how I did it", that's harder for you to deal with them; if someone says "Here's the 5 things that I'm doing, it doesn't work this way; [inaudible] the code and we can step through in the debug", respecting those guys' time and you'll get a lot more kind of value out with the Labs, I think.

Yeah. One thing I got from talking to them is that you get sort of some unofficial "nudging" that if you take the hint, you could pretty much guarantee that this is going to payoff in the long run, like they would look at you and wink and say "You should really be doing this thing over here instead". And they won't tell you why; they're not going to give you a statement that you can go blog later. But it was interesting talking to the AVFoundation guys about streaming performance and things like that. One of the things I got was HTTP Live Streaming as where all their time is being spent. So the other way of doing it is progressive download of files, and that is certainly supported and worked, but their focus is on HTTP Live Streaming. And I got to talk to the guy who, I guess he invented the spec - the HTTP Live Streaming spec. So, who better to talk to about this stuff? Then the guy who invented it.

One of the Labs is you can get your user interface cryptic, which is really useful. And Saul Mora pointed out today on his podcast that you can actually file a DTS ticket on the Apple developers site and get one of those anytime.

Oh, that's nice! I don't tend to use those very often, so it'd be good to get --

DTS is...

The Developer ticket or --

Technical Support.

Yeah.

And you get like two of those a year; it was [inaudible].

Right.

Yeah. And I just forget that I have them. Sometimes, where there's going to be a problem, we just kind of push our way through it. I have used them in the past. It's kind of the same story; you have to have a distilled sample that is actionable, which I think is just general good life advice. Like when sending somebody an email if you're asking for help or whatever, the best possible thing you could do is set up the scenario in a way where they could definitively tell you "Yes" or "No".

Oh, my gosh! As an open source maintainer, I agree wholeheartedly with that statement. [Ben laughs]

I managed the Tech Support department for a company out here and I had 20 or 30 technicians. And I can't even imagine how much time we would have saved if people knew how to do that. So, I want to jump in on one other thing and that is that it seems like there's a pretty big Alt Dub Dub DC thing going on. Are you guys involved in that at all?

Last year, I knew a few people who went to the AltWWDC event; it was at StackMob, which wasn't necessarily super close to Moscone, but it was close enough where you would see those folks out at bars and parties and stuff afterwards. And they just had kind of, I guess it was like open office hours, where you could come, they had a few technical sessions, and then you could come just work on stuff and just be social and should be part of the overall atmosphere of San Francisco during that time. And from what I understand, it was really well-received. And they're doing it again this year; you can find out the details at altwwdc.com. I believe it's only like a block or two away from Moscone, so it's even closer. So, you'll see people there. And then I know CocoaConf, which is a popular travelling conference, just kind of wanted to, I guess, provide their valuable conference experience for those who want to be at WWDC, but couldn't get a ticket. So they actually had booked a hotel right across the street from Moscone, and they were going to call it "CocoaConf Alt". I was actually scheduled to speak there, so I was going to have to duck out for one hour and go give a talk. But there's some official Apple policy about competing conferences within the radius of the hotel and made them cancel; the hotel had to give up on them. It was kind of one of those things that's just unfortunate and there is no really ill will by any specific person; you can read about that on the CocoaConf blog. Dave, the organizer, was just saying "It's unfortunate, but what are we going to do?" So hopefully, next year they'll be able to do something similar. But there's plenty of things to do in San Francisco during that time. AltWWDC seems like the place to be if you're going to be there and don't have a ticket.

Yeah. There's always been kind of, in a way, that Alt kind of have aspect of WWDC, which is like all of the evening stuff apart from that Thursday night. Like there's normally 3 or 4 different kind of competing parties; GitHub, and all kind of the trendy startups that you can think of that are based in San Francisco and normally hosting some event. I think it's a great way to get to meet people outside of the standard kind of conference context. And if you don't have a ticket, you can still go and presumably get free food [chuckles], and probably free alcohol, too.

I'm going to read this other tip, it's number 27 on this First Timer's Guide, "Don't Sound Like a Noob". So it's technically called the "World Wide Developer's Conference", so logically, you'd expect people to refer to it as "the WWDC", only people really do. It's just WWDC, or Dub Dub DC, or just Dub Dub. So, don't sound like a noob.

I'm going to start calling it "the Dub Dub". [Laughter]

Why, it's my old pronunciation of "the Dub Dub".

[Laughs] Another good tip is to "Update Your Twitter Avatar" if you're going. If you have some sort of abstract picture or cartoon face or whatever, you want people to be able to find you and recognize you from interactions you've had on Twitter, so make sure it's your actual face.

A good one here is number 24, "Bring a Jacket"; this is a general good advice for San Francisco. The coldest time of year in San Francisco is the summer time because of the fog, and it's not what you expect them as you live here.

Yeah, and they give you a jacket, so it covered.

Yeah, that's right! Okay so this is a great pro-tip: if you are not extra-large in size and you want a jacket that fits you, don't pick up your pass earlier than you would think because I went and just kind of sauntered over there on Sunday afternoon; because for me, it's just a bike ride to go to Moscone, so I kind of sauntered over there to pick up my pass. And by the time I showed up, they only had like XXXXL jacket, so I ended up getting an XXXXL jacket; I'm not XXXXL. [laughter]

We ended up cutting off the arms of the jacket and making a pair of pants for my son -[Laughter]

So he's the only person who has Dub Dub DC pants.

Nice!

Take that Apple! [Laughter]

Yeah, swag is swag even if it's few sizes too big, right?

Exactly.

Yup! One thing you can do is keep an eye on the wwdcparties.com website and they will list the parties that people are throwing. Some of them are invite only, like I know the Push IO party I went to last year, you had to register for an invite and they would send you like a wrist band or something. And you go there and there's like sponsors there and they're like swag, they're demoing -- it was like a projector that you could plug in at the bottom of your iPhone, and it would do video out and project the screen on to any surface.

Oh, wow!

It was pretty interesting. I think AirPlay might defeat that in its tracks, but it was still very cool! I got some gloves that are like touch-sensitive gloves or capacitive capable gloves. So if you live in a cold environment, you can use your iPhone with gloves. But I live in Houston, so I would just never use that. [Laughter]

I want a pair of gloves [laughs].

It's the Houston equivalent of an XXXXL jacket. [Laughter]

Yup. But they had good DJ and drinks; you're probably not going to pay for a whole lot of drinks at night if you go to these parties.

I'm going to put in a very brief plug; I don't have a ticket this year, but since I live in San Francisco, I think I might host a little very small informal Test Automation Meetup/Drinkup on some evening. So if you're interested in Test Automation and you're going to be in San Francisco that week, follow me on Twitter and I'll be tweeting about it near the time, I think.

Your Twitter handle is...

@ph1

Alright.

Awesome. It's also interesting and it's fun to watch the Keynote and see all the announcements and stuff. Do you guys have any recommendations if you're watching it online?

Well typically, you can't watch it online live, anyway.

No, I mean just the Keynote.

In my company, we always have somebody who pick up lunch or we'll all just bring our lunch into the conference room and we'll all watch it and talk about it. Usually, we've got a couple of audio streams going if there's no live video and we've got the live blogs going. So people are just going to shout out the scuttlebutt as it is announced and sort of make just an event out of it.

And that's more or less what I've done. Sometimes, I'll get together with some folks; most of the time, I just have it playing kind of off to the side. And then when they announced that the iMac is so much thinner than last iMac, then I'll go and look and see what they've done. That's the other thing that I've been fairly impressed with; that they have thousands of people watching it online and generally don't have a problem playing it. Anyway, any other advice for folks who are going to go out to WWDC?

Bring your charging cables [Chuckles]. [Chuck laughs]

You're probably going to do have any great opportunities to charge your devices. So as soon as you have an opportunity, take it because it will be a little bit sad if your phone runs out of battery and you're not going to be able to find your way around San Francisco, when you go to the parties, or see what people are talking about on Twitter. And speaking of what people are talking about on Twitter, it's kind of funny that Twitter gets really interesting during that week because everybody is kind of shouting out their opinions and their predictions and everything, and all of a sudden, “Now we know what's coming up; we can't say anything about it”. So people all of a sudden, they just stopped talking about Apple stuff in specifics, and then they start talking more about just "Oh, this room...(these all vague stuff). So, you should be in Presidio right now because right now it's the coolest thing I've seen", but they can't say anything more than that.

I guess it's because all under NDA, right?

Yeah, I was going to say...So the whole conference is under NDA except for the Keynote, which they make really really public. Is the party on Thursday night, is that NDA? Or, is that kind of a public event, too?

That's entirely NDA. They don't say who played and what food there was. [Laughter]

I guess they just don't talk about NDA stuff at the party then.

You can't go to the party without a ticket.

Right.

So, everybody who has a ticket already signed the NDA. So, the Keynote is really the only thing that you can talk about, and so you're not supposed to take pictures or anything like that, of slides or whatever. And then afterwards, I've heard that they may even be live streaming to videos for the sessions this year, but you will have to sign in with your Apple account, in which case, you're bound by the NDA. And they're pretty strict about that as well, like you don't want to abuse that privilege.

I heard they'd be available about two hours after the session.

Oh, wow!

I think I remember, like in previous years, having debate with people about whether you could talk about something because you learnt about it in a session afterwards, but they did announced it during the Keynote, so you could reference that in general. But how specific could you get? Did they mention this particular feature about maps? Can I talk about it all night? It's really funny.

Yeah, I remember looking at -- they had one of the slides that were really like "And, we've included these many new APIs in iOS 6" and then it does one of those Keynote transition where all the words kind of plop, plop, plop all over the screen. And then I saw one that said Unit Testing, and all of a sudden I was getting really excited. Unfortunately, it was for nothing; I don't even know why they put it up there honestly. But, everybody is like reading into those and were like "Does that mean it's announced?" or whatever.

Yeah, interesting. Alright, well, I think we've pretty well covered this. If you're going to go to WWDC and you want to connect with Ben or Pete who will be out and about over there, feel free to follow them on Twitter. Are there other good ways that you want people to connect with you?

Buy an NSScreencast T-shirt and then I will find you!

Oh, there you go! [Rod laughs]

Yeah.

Alright, well let's get into the picks then. Ben, do you want to go first?

Sure! So I already sort of mentioned my tips for this week, which were the "First Timer's Guide" by Jeff Lamarche, and he updates this every year with some tips. The next one is a post that's a few years old by Brent Simmons, and it's another tips blog about just what to do like the first one is "Drink plenty of water". So it's just from people that have been going to this thing for years; they have some things that they think that you shouldn't miss, like for instance the Apple Design Awards ceremony. It's interesting because you get to see who wins the awards and that they show up on stage and accept this prestigious thing. Anyway, so I will link both of those. Then something unrelated to WWDC that I saw this week, which is cool, is "sparkinspector.com". I kind of have a feeling that Pete was going to pick this one [laughs].

You know what, that's handful but I would have done it [inaudible]...

[laughs] Okay.

Plus 1 on that pick, plus 1! [Chuck laughs]

Yeah, so I can't really describe it to you other than: if you were to take a view hierarchy, blow out all of the depth of all the controls in what order they laid, and then rotate it in 3D space so you can see how they're laid on top of each other. That's what this thing does for you; it's basically a view debugging. It's a per pay tool, but the opening video just kind of looks pretty awesome. So, I will link to that as well! And, those are my picks!

That's awesome. Rod, what are your picks?

I just have one pick this week, it's "RubyMotion 2.0" that they announced last week. The big thing is it adds its OS X support so now you can write Mac Apps with RubyMotion, and if you added templates so you can create your own project templates and plugins for the Motion command line utility. That's my pick!

Awesome. Alright Pete, what are your picks?

I just realized I should, being a local, I should pick some like obscure local things that you should do while you're at Dub Dub DC, so I've been furiously Google mapping. [Chuck laughs]

So my first pick is a very small hole in the wall coffee place called "Special Xtra", which according to Google maps, is about 2 blocks from Moscone, maybe 3 blocks; they're long blocks, but it's nice to walk sometimes. So, I recommend walking to Special Xtra, and I'll send the link in the show notes to the map and stuff, and getting a nice espresso and enjoying the sights and sounds of San Francisco.

How does that compared to Blue Bottle?

They serve Blue Bottle Coffee, they are not a Blue Bottle place, but they serve Blue Bottle Coffee. So, they do really really quite good.

I've never actually been there, but I order their coffee online quite a bit.

Yeah. And there's an official Blue Bottle fair in Moscone; I think it's at Mint Street or something like that. But yeah, Blue Bottle is like the kind of the main stream hipster coffee of San Francisco, that's if you don't know. My second pick is a restaurant that's near Moscone called "Tropisueno", and they do good Mexican food and they do a roaring lunch tray so they will get you a burrito quickly and it will be good quality. It's right opposite the Yerba Buena kind of gardens, which is right near Moscone, so if the fog is cleared, you can go to Tropisueno, get a burrito, sit outside in the sunshine with your new WWDC friends and talk about NDA things. [Chuck laughs]

Or, probably you shouldn't talk about NDA things because you're not technically out the conference, so don't do that. And my third pick is "Being nice to people" - the concept of being nice to people. It's nice to be nice to people! I've been noting recently that some people are not nice; and the people who are nice tend to get more achieved in life. So I've been thinking about this a lot recently; I just noticed some people in the open source community tend to enjoy their power by being mean to people who need help, and I don't really see the point when you can just be nice to people and you can get a lot more done in life. So, that's my third pick.

Here, here!

Yup!

Yeah.

So, closely related to your third pick, I read a book over the weekend and this is one of my picks. It's called "The Fred Factor", it's by Mark Sanborn. He talks about basically being that kind of person that goes above and beyond in serving people, and taking care of people and sort of being a good person, and at the same time, just over-delivering. The example that he used is actually his mail carrier from Denver (he lives out in that area) and he talks about how this guy went above and beyond as a mail carrier, which is kind of a job that I guess you wouldn't really expect to people to do that. So I really really like the book; it's a really fast read, it's like 100 pages or something. Anyway, it really inspired me and I'm hoping to really inspire some other people to do some of the same things to go out of their way and help people out. Anyway, that's one pick. Another pick that I have is "reflectorapp.com", well, it's Reflector App, it's an app for your Mac. Basically, what it does is it enables your Mac to act as an AirPlay device. So if you want to mirror the screen on your iPad or iPhone onto a device that you can like record things off of and stuff like that, then Reflector is a cool way to go; so I've been kind of playing with that. So anyway, those are my picks. We'll wrap the show up! We'll catch you all next week! And next week, we're talking to Ben Lachman about Prototypes, so it should be good!

Awesome! We'll have to see some of you folks at WWDC!

Yeah, likewise!