What to do before and during WWDC25
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What's up everybody? Welcome to another CompileSwift episode here. And yes, it is that time of year. It is Christmas for Apple platform developers. So we are going to be talking about all the things you should do to have a good WWDC. Get ready for it. It's almost here and we got the list to make sure you have a good one because it's all on us.

But how are you doing, Jeff? Definitely seems like we're going to maybe have an eventful WWDC this year. This is not going to be one of the boring WWDCs, which are always the best ones. But no, we're going to have maybe some excitement this year. But we're not here to speculate on what's going to happen about WWDC. We're going to talk about the things that you should do regardless. In case of what happens. Yes. Yes. Clean out the solarium. See what I did there? Yep. Yep.

All right, so let's talk about, you know, things. This is based on what we do, right? At least this is what I do every year. And I usually put out this advice, but...

Which is objectively correct. Objectively correct. But it's always amazing to me that there are some folks who don't take the advice and then you're like, well, you know, that's what happened. So we're going to break this down. So let's start by talking about what you should do before the conference gets here, which basically as of this recording is next week. So what we're about to say, you should be doing this.

And... You should be on this already. In fact, you should have already listened to this episode. So if you're listening to it again, hopefully, is what's happening. But number one, we're going to go through this list. I'll do the first one here. The second most crucial thing, back up everything. Right? If you are one of those people and you know who you are, it's all of us, let's be honest...

who's like oh oh look a very early beta i've got to install this on things back everything

That is, that is like number one. Hey, you should be backing stuff up anyway, but make sure you go out of your way to do everything. Do all the devices. Uh, after you've got everything backed up, the other thing you're going to want to do, uh, is clean off your drive. Make sure that, uh, you've got room for all these things. You're going to be downloading a bunch of betas of Xcode, uh, new versions of Mac OS, probably depending on how you install it. The, uh,

restore images for new versions of iOS, all of your other devices. So that's going to take up a lot of room.

make sure you've got room for it. It's going to be not a fun day for you. If you're like, Oh man, all this cool new stuff I'm going to check out. I'm going to install the new version of Xcode and it turns out you can't do it because you have four gigs of space left on your hard drive. So make sure you get everything cleaned off. Make sure that you've got the room to have everything that you're going to want to have. And that's,

A lot of things, but make sure you got it. Yeah. I mean, at least with Xcode, right? That's an easy enough problem to solve because you can just, you know, if need be, boom, delete all those 50 betas and RCs that you didn't worry about the rest of the year. Well, we'll get rid of them now, right? Yeah.

You only need... I would say keep whatever the current release one is, right? Probably don't need all the others at this point because I know even on my Mac Mini here...

I can't get, you know, barely a few versions of Xcode if I need to. And one way, obviously, that this can be pretty easy is a lot of these things can be just installed or at least saved on separate drives. So if you need to go pick up a small external hard drive to install Xcode on, to have your other install of macOS on, take a look at the

take the time to go do that now or get your external drive, figure out what closet you've buried it in, any of that kind of stuff. So that's one way of handling the space issue is just use an external drive. And, you know, that's what I do. I always use external drives for macOS versions. It may be slightly different this year because I've got two Macs

Thunderbolt 4 external drives with two NVMEs in so that gives me four terabytes. So I may put them on there this year. Moving on. So now it's time. It's happened folks, right? The conference is here and so we want to give you some advice and some tips and

for how to get the most out of the conference. And we're going to do this two different ways, right? Number one, you're one of those lucky people that's going to do it in person.

Or number two, you are the rest of us and you will be doing it online. So Jeff, you want to kick off the in-person here? And let's be clear, neither of us are actually either one of those lucky people. No, I didn't even try. We will not be there in person, but I've attended quite a few of the developer conferences in person. And so this is my tips from past years and hopefully they still apply these days.

We're going to start out with the number one most important tip. This really applies to everybody, but please, for the love of God, if you're in person, if you are away from your home, if you are out of state or out of country, do not install betas on your only phone. Please don't do that.

You're going to install a beta on your phone. You're going to not be able to boot your airline app anymore and you're not going to be able to make it home. Don't do it. Just don't. If you are away from your home in general, don't install betas on your production device or on your main personal device. Just don't do it. If you are in person at a conference, double, triple, quadruple, don't do it. Do not do that. Yeah. Yeah. It,

There's my number one pick. If you take nothing else away from this episode, that's the one right there. What in the world makes you think the first beta of a new major version is going to be something that's going to make you happy? Right? It's not. Yes, you want to try the new Shiny. You want to see it. You want to say like, oh, I saw the new interface and it's great. Everything's made of glass and I can see through all 50 windows at once.

It will get old quickly. And at some point, if you have to ship something, you ain't shipping it with that version. Let's put it like that. And again, just to reiterate, it's not just shipping stuff. It's being able to turn the phone on. Call home. Yeah. Yeah. Call the roadside service to replace that wheel. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, no, just don't do it. Bring, if you can, a test device, bring something else to install it on. If you really only have one particular device of a kind, just make sure that nothing life important is on there. You know, if I were going in person, yeah, I would probably install the new Vision OS on my only Vision Pro because I don't have a spare $4,000 to spend on another Vision Pro.

But, you know, I'm not relying on my Vision Pro to get home. That's where I'm at. In fact, even if you had to use the production version, you're not going to get home with it. Simple as that. Yeah. The worst is you'll have a long plane flight because you won't be able to watch anything in a huge virtual screen. Right. Yeah. All right. Next one.

Anyway, now that we've got that planned out, Peter, do you want to talk about what kinds of things you should do at the actual conference? So if you are at the conference, right, anybody who's ever read anything online knows there is a ton of

of activities around the conference, right? So we are talking about, you know, third-party conferences, social gatherings, all of these cool things. And you should make it about those, right? This is the time of year, right? Everybody can come together. You can meet people you've never met. You can hang out with the folks you already know.

Make the most of it. Be sociable. Go to these separate conferences. Go to these gatherings. Hang out. Jeff did Deep Dish this year. Go hang out with folks. Talk about things.

It's a fantastic social experience. And Jeff, having that you've been there yourself, you can probably talk more about this. This is one of the few times a year that you have people in the industry kind of all gathering in one spot. And so in addition to WWDC itself, there's a bunch of ongoing side parties and side gatherings and whatnot.

Two of the big ones are the one more thing conference and community kit, which is like, it's just a bunch of separate meetups and stuff. Definitely go to those. I would also keep an eye out for different gatherings and stuff that are unrelated to those two. I know, I think revenue cat is like having a happy hour somewhere that may be already sold out by the time you hear about this. Um, I think there's another couple ones. Uh,

go look online. There's a whole bunch of these kinds of things going on and just keep an eye out for events that are happening around WWDC. So if you get a chance to go to one of those, it's another great place to hang out with people that are interested in app development and get to meet a bunch of new people. All right. And so that's in person. Now,

This next one is going to be for everybody else online. And I'll kick this one off here. The keynote is arguably the most boring part of the week. I know that sounds weird, but think about it, folks, right? We all pretty much complain about this every year. The keynote is really just Apple sales and marketing, right? Let's be honest about it.

Yeah, it's commercial. And I'm not saying that doesn't serve a purpose. I'm just saying for us, you know, it's like, okay, but this is a developer conference. Let them get their marketing bit out the way, right? Yes, we know whatever they've got, it's the fastest thing ever. Numbers are great. Life is fantastic. Yada, yada, yada, right? Arguably, I think, you know,

Focusing on the platform State of the Union is the real first key insight as to what's going to happen in this conference. And so pay attention to that one. If need be, like if you can only make one of them, make State of the Union, right? And if you're online, you can watch all of these later again anyway. But it's always fun to watch the State of the Union in...

real time so that by the time it's done it's safe to go back to social media and they won't spoil it for you there is time to take in and absorb everything and figure out what it is that is interesting what is not interesting you know what's great what's awful after the platform state of the union we will typically get the full schedule after that and this is the time for you to start planning out what are you doing for the rest of the week um

A very quick and easy thing to do at that point is to open up Apple's developer app, take a look at all of the sessions that you see in there, and go in and immediately bookmark all of the ones that sound interesting to you. So go in there, say, I want to watch this video, this video, this video, this video. These are the ones that matter to me. And just be ready to go in there and

take a look at those as they get posted. They think they typically get posted, I believe, 9 a.m. Pacific every day of the week. As soon as that's ready there, you can sit in and hop in and watch all of those videos and be ready to learn whatever it is that Apple wants to share with you in those videos. In addition to the sessions, we also have the ongoing labs. Now, this year, they did also do something new with the labs, which is that they've got these new group labs that you can sign up for in advance.

I can't really say too much about them because they're brand new. And so I don't really have a thrilling opinion on those, but for the other labs, absolutely go take advantage of these labs. They are the secret gem of WWDC. This is your one time a year. And I know we said that line earlier, but whatever, uh,

This is your one time a year that you get to sit down with somebody inside Apple and say, hey, you built this thing. I can't figure it out or it doesn't work the way that I expect and have them respond to you. Do you understand how rare that is to get somebody from Apple to actually listen to you and talk to you?

If you are not taking advantage of these, you're missing out. That's all I can say is you get a chance to come in with whatever question you want, with whatever thoughts or opinions you have, and get Apple to listen to you. And you can give feedback directly to the engineers that matter without having a problem.

stuck in the middle of you and them. The way that these work is typically you go in, you fill out a time for lab and you say, hey, I want to talk with this lab. I want to talk with this team. And they make you put in why it is that you want to talk to them. And that's usually just so that they can be prepared for something like that. The more popular labs do some amount of filtering based on

what it is that you're actually asking. And if it's not worthy enough, quote unquote, they may be like, oh, I'll just go to the, go to the forums or go to the whatever. If the lab is not one of those that's like super popular, then,

They're not even filtering based on that. They are happy to have people to talk to. And so there is one lab that I've gone to. I'm not going to say which one because everybody's going to come in and steal my lab time away. There's one group that I've gone to the last three years. And what I fill in in that box is I just want to chat with the team.

And they've always done it. And just go in and I chat with that team for half an hour, an hour, I think. I don't remember how long these sessions are. And I've always found it super useful to just go in and say, I want to go talk to these people and...

like how I'm using their framework, what kinds of things that I'm doing and have them chat with me back and really give me tips on like, oh, well, have you tried doing X, Y, Z? Have you tried doing this? And, you know, this isn't technically allowed, but, you know, we're,

we can probably guarantee that it's not going to destroy your app. And it's this nice chance to have an open discussion with Apple that you just would not get any other way. So that's my main advice there is go take advantage of the labs. This is a rare occasion to get to talk to Apple and so you should take advantage of it. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think that

how important it is to have this access to these engineers, right? The folks that build the things you are trying to use. It is absolutely

Absolutely crucial to take advantage of this. So another thing you can do here is Apple in previous years, and we don't know yet if there is one this year. If there is, they will list in the developer portal, I am sure. But Apple has actually had an official Slack account.

for the developer conference. So, you know, if you're a Slack user or you want to get involved with that, you absolutely should because, again, this is, you know, think about it. It's a 24-7 thing, right? It doesn't end when the conference ends at the end of the day.

Now, along with that, of course, there are lots of other Apple developer communities out there. Lots of Slacks, lots of Discords. Hey, you know what? You should join the Dev Club Discord. Just saying. We'll put a link in the show notes for that one. But take advantage of them. Now, of course, the beauty of these is they exist all year, right? Not just the conference. But...

Naturally, there is a heightened activity level during June because of the conference. And so you will find a lot more people to engage with on those platforms during the week. And just like we were mentioning earlier online in person, new relationships there. And you will, you know, engage.

Find new folks that maybe you get to work with or some of them are even posting projects they're going to work on, those kind of things. But get involved with those now during the conference because you never know where that's going to take you. And especially if you're someone starting out, that is a great place to start when you don't know what to do or where to go. That will start your journey off this year nicely with the developer conference and take it from there.

Okay, so that is our advice for the conference this year. Hey,

enjoy it right there's bound to be some things you're gonna absolutely get super excited about there might be some things that'll frustrate you but enjoy it that that is the key takeaway here so uh we're going to be doing that you know hopefully you are listening to this ahead of time that was the goal here and enjoy the conference there will be i am sure content from us uh covering some of the conference and things like that once we get over the shock of whatever they tell us but jeff where can they find you

You can find everything that I have, all my apps, links to my live streams, all of that kind of stuff at Cocoa type.com. Uh, I do plan on doing what I do every year and, and live streaming most of the week of WWDC. And so if you are excited to see somebody come check out all of the new shiny, or if you have questions about things you want me to check out and try to get the answers before you do, uh,

Come check that out. I'll be there all week. All right. And you can find me as always at PeterWhitam.com. And you can find this podcast at CompileSwift.com. I'm going to try and do some live streams too. But in all honesty, if Jeff's going to be live streaming, it's much more fun for me to hang out in his chat and give him hell rather than him give me hell. So that's it, folks. It's going to be a week. We will speak to you next time.