From WWDC information overload to information zen
A strategy for coping with WWDC
Each year at WWDC, Apple unveil new features and APIs for their growing roster of platforms.
Some years are more exciting than others, but since this year is especially exciting and subjectively packed full of new stuff, I’d like to offer a plan for dealing with the overwhelming wealth of new information, not to mention chronic FOMO, and the feeling like you’re immediately lagging behind everyone so vocal on Twitter.
Unsurprisingly, the key is to be methodical and organised.
The Keynote
The public WWDC Keynote is fun to watch, but you don’t need to have FOMO if you don’t watch it live, or even watch it at all.
This presentation is primarily Apple’s PR platform to get everyone who isn’t a developer, or self-professed nerd, excited about the upcoming changes to their products. It’s always full of slightly tedious spiel about how well Apple are doing and that they’re the best at doing everything.
The real important stuff to watch is in the next scheduled event, the Platforms State of the Union.
Platforms State of the Union
This is where the juicy stuff is. While it can be fun to watch the main Keynote with friends and colleagues, I recommend settling down to watch PSotU on your own, somewhere that you can’t be distracted and with a good connection.
It’s also completely fine to not watch this live and focus on it when you get time.
If time is an issue, you can get away with not watching the main Keynote at all as a developer because PSotU will reliably cover all the big important announcements, with the benefit of being in a more developer-focused way.
Before going any further it’s a good idea to plug in any devices you want to dedicate to running the new betas of iOS, watchOS, macOS etc, as well as making sure they’re already running the latest releases of their respective platform. You should also kick off the downloads for any available beta software you want to install, because it can be slooooow, and you can forget about it while you’re watching PSotU.
When you settle down to watch the event, crack open your favourite note taking app and begin making notes about anything that piques your interest. At this point just keep it brief, but if you want to make it easier to find what you made a note about you can make a rough note of the time in the video as you make a note. This is when not watching it live will help because you can easily pause and rewind.
Once it’s over, I then like to take the time to tidy up my notes and start to prioritise them in the order I find most interesting.
API diffs
Chances are now you’ve got a good idea of what you want to learn about first, but before you do anything it’s a good idea to start installing any beta software that has finished downloading. It can take a while, and you can let that run while looking at the next bit.
After making my initial list of things to learn about, there’s a few other things I like to do; starting with checking out the API diffs.
If you mosey on over to the developer docs, you can get them to display the changes between the last version of Xcode and the new beta. On each page at the top it will give you a quick overview of anything modified (purple), new/added (green), and deprecated (red), as well as an indicator around each new item on the page.
On the “root” page of the list of frameworks you can see which frameworks are new or modified, and you can use that to drill down and learn about what has changed in any of the frameworks you’re interested in.
This step is important (and fun), especially if you’re already making and maintaining apps, because sometimes small changes here aren’t mentioned in any WWDC video.
As you drill down into frameworks and find new stuff, since it’s a web page you can grab a link and add to your notes.
Release notes
When you’re ready, the next step is to start to take a look at the release notes for the platforms you’re interested in, but also Xcode which can be a gem of a place to find unmentioned new features.
Release notes can sometimes take a while to show up, but by doing it at this stage they should be available.
They can be quite lengthy, so again I recommend adding anything you are interested in to your notes. It’s a good idea to make a note of any bugs that can affect what you’re working on or interested in learning about. Thankfully Apple provide bug numbers for everything so you can just make a brief note and include the bug number to quickly find it in the release notes later (as well as quickly find out if it’s been fixed in subsequent release notes).
One more thing
At this point you should have a nice prioritised and tidy list of notes and information to guide you to where to start. But there is one final thing I like to do, which is best done at this point now you have an idea of what you want to learn about.
Using either the official WWDC app (available from the App Store on iOS, iPadOS and tvOS), or the incredible unofficial app for macOS, you can go through all of the video sessions that are now available to browse and favourite the ones that are related to the stuff you’ve identified as areas you want to learn about.
You now know where and when that information will be available, and you can start to plan your learning time accordingly.
If you’re not actually at WWDC, although you don’t have access to the labs or the people, you do have the luxury of being able to watch all of the videos at a time that suits you, sometimes even before people in San Jose.
A footnote on Twitter
Twitter is a great place to watch stuff live with your followers and followees. It can be extremely distracting though and you can really quickly find yourself feeling like you’re falling behind because people have more time to spare than you to play around and explore.
It’s important to remember that you’re not a worse developer because you’ve got less time to spend on playing around with new stuff. (In fact I would argue you’re a better developer because you’ve actually got stuff to be doing 😉)
You cannot do everything at once, so pick what is most important to you and move onwards from there.
