| Absolutely. I was building an enterprise app doing multiple simultaneous asynchronous HTTP calls, but was running into issues where certain connections would just die outright. The problem was that the dying connections seemed non-deterministic, which obviously made it very difficult to debug. I spent most of the week before WWDC trying to debug the issue (to no avail), but since WWDC was coming up (and since I was already registered), I made sure to set aside some time to go to the Framework labs to see if I can get some help. I went the first day it was open... and was able to talk to the Apple engineer who actually built the Foundation httpClient class. I sat down with him for about 20 min, where we actually went over my code, and he was able to explain what I was doing incorrectly. 20 minutes. And it was fixed. I probably would've had to spend at least another week banging my head against a wall, and even then, it might not have gotten fixed correctly. Given any reasonable hourly rate, that single one-on-one alone already paid for the entire conference. IMO, if you're going to just hobnob and go to the keynote and sessions, then yes, your money is probably going to be better spent elsewhere, especially since all the sessions are available online, and because most of the after-parties and networking events all throughout SF/SOMA don't require you to register for WWDC. But if you have projects you are actively working on and are encountering issues or anticipate that you will be encountering issues that will be time consuming to debug on your own, then if you spend some or most of your time in the labs, WWDC is absolutely invaluable. |
I don't disagree BUT for this to make sense you have to have a major bug in your app you're having trouble solving and have that happen at the same time WWDC takes place.