Reporter's Notebook - Days 3,4 in WWDCville

by , 7:30 PM EDT, June 12th, 2008

Now we're getting down to the nitty-gritty. Code, code and more code. WWDC attendees are learning how to implement what Steve Jobs talked about on Monday.

Okay, this is just too good to be true. Another day of cloudless blue sky and high 70s. One could actually grow fond of this place, assuming one could afford to live here.

While at WWDC, I've been keeping track of the percentage of women at WWDC. I have a particular interest in that because I'm married to a Ph.D. programmer (Java, C++). Over several days, I've done some head counts, and I estimate that there are no more than 2% women at WWDC. Worse, as the number of attendees over the years has gone up, it seems that the percentage of women has gone down.

About a third of the women, I estimate are Asian, about a third (East) Indian and the rest Caucasian. This doesn't bode well for American technology. In my experience, and based on demographic data, women constitute a much larger percentage of the technical work force. Some reasons for this low percentage might be:

• Managers tend to subconsciously send young men rather than women to conferences.
• Women are smarter than men and instinctively steer away from Objective-C as career limiting and stick with C++ and Java.
• There is something about the Apple culture and marketing that appeals to men and not so much women.

I'm certain the readers will have additional enlightenment on this.

In addition to the feeing I got that developers better start thinking about ways to get into iPhone development, I also saw several other effects. First, Apple, as always, focuses on the technologies that are going to advance their cause. While there may be scientists who want Apple to fully support, say, technology X,Y and Z, Apple will decide that only Z moves their technology forward and integrates into what they already have. It's nothing callous, mind you. It's just what Leander Kahney refers to as "burning your bridges." That is, if you don't burn the bridge behind you, there's nothing else to do but stand and fight. It's a healthy approach.

A second trend I saw is that emerging hardware is enabling a new class of applications. For example, a modern graphics processor (GPU) in a Mac Pro is capable of nearly a half teraflop. For those developers who are astute enough to invoke this kind of speed, users will be seeing some jaw dropping apps. It's all part of that focusing and leveraging that Apple is so good at.

I also noticed that presenters are leaving their bio slides up on the screen long enough now to actually type the name into the computer. Interacting with technology evangelists at Apple is vital, and when developers pay a lot of money to attend WWDC, they need to know who they met. This something I complained about last year. Thanks Apple for fixing that.

By Thursday, the developers get pretty fried, but the introductory sessions are long gone. So now it's down to the business of going into the lab, debugging code, and sitting in on code sessions that can boggle the mind unless one has prepared with healthy doses of caffeine.

Then, exhausted, the developers will fly home on Friday full of new ideas and ambitions for fabulous new projects.