Un-conventional: How WWDC became the heart of the Apple world’s calendar

Jason Snell, writing for iMore:

While most members of the media are content to go to the keynote, write their stories about Apple’s big announcements, and then head home, when I was at Macworld I always bought a developer badge and attended sessions. Yes, they were confidential — I couldn’t write anything about what I learned there — but they also provided background material about how OS X (and later iOS) worked that proved invaluable when new versions of those products shipped.

Still, at many sessions, I would realize that after 20 minutes of solid introductory material, the slides were suddenly starting to fill with code. I am not a developer. Code makes my head hurt. Instead, I would retreat outside and hope that someone had re-filled the candy bowl.

But while the sessions at WWDC are absolutely not for everyone, in the past few years it’s become clear that WWDC has still become an event for everyone who works in the Apple-related universe. Quite simply, there’s no single event on the calendar that draws enough of us together in one location: WWDC has critical mass.

WWDC is a massively good time and the center of the Apple universe, at least for a week. Great writeup.