Ask Reuben
WWDC24 – Review
Where are WWDC slides?
How was WWDC ?
What would you do different at next WWDC?
It has been over a month since I disembarked from my last airplane ride for WWDC. The slides and presentations went up on the conference site https://4js.com/wwdc-24-around-the-world-with-four-js/ shortly after the last presentation. There are 4 plenaries, 10 breakouts, and 6 customer experience. My last three Ask-Reuben articles, I have attempted the equivalent of a “DVD Directors Commentary” on three of the breakout presentations. With this article I thought I’d blog on a few thoughts from WWDC… One of the reasons for going for a regional model with 4 events around the world was to get in front of more attendees than if we just had a single event. We achieved that goal but we would have liked more. When I look at who did attend and who didn’t attend, the customers whom we could not persuade to attend I felt were the ones who needed to attend the most!. If I look back at slides 11-60 https://4js.com/files/documents/wwdc24/A03_Product_And_Customer_Care_Update.pdf some of the key points I hope those who attended benefited from are that they … For those that did not attend, you can spend nearly 50 weeks a year working from your office (or in some cases home). Its less than 2% of your time to attend a conference once during the year but I believe you will be have a more than 2% bump in productivity. For those that ask, was there a video recording or live streaming? If we did that, no one would attend. If you can think of a solution that rewards those who invest in attending I am interested whilst still passing knowledge onto everyone I am open to it. Just like you, as an organisation we have a finite set of resources. We face tough decisions on what features we should add, what to include, what to leave out. During the events you might have seen … I can quickly come up with a set of features I’d include in the product if I had unlimited resources. We need to make sure we have your input into what you’d like. So if there is an enhancement you’d like, make sure you have a number for it so that you know it is in our system. In the appropriate place in the release cycle, it would not hurt to bend your support contacts ear and make sure that it is being considered and if you don’t see it in the EAP, raise again. I like to use the two methods base.Stringtokenizer.create and base.StringTokenizer.createExt to illustrate why you should participate in EAP. If we’d had the feedback earlier we might have one method and not two. For getting feedback I currently use the position of scrollbars when aggregates are used as an example. Internally it has been questioned, is that right? but to date AFAIK no one has reported an issue that the scrollbar should be beneath the aggregate value and not above it. Without negative feedback, we can only assume you are OK with it and we should priorities issues that you are unhappy with. Not all our regions are the same, and the sites and personalities have different characteristics. For example, Melbourne has many development sites so most attendees came from home. Whereas in Cancun no Genero developer lives in Cancun. Where attendees have flown in, they are present and likely to attend all activities. Where attendees are staying at home, more susceptible to life activities getting in the way. On the other hand, in Melbourne we were able to say , don’t need to send a lot of people for both days, some of your junior team members might get something out of sessions on day 2 so just send them on day 2. I found some regions were stronger in certain areas and weaker than others. That I believe is historical for the fact that our support offices were more independent than what they are now. I like to adhere to “Give a man a fish, you have fed him for a day, teach a man to fish you have fed him for a lifetime”. I will always try and provide a link in that not only will you read the documentation, you might know where to look next time, you might follow some links and read adjacent pages etc. It was an eye opener talking to a senior developer from another region who struggled to open some documentation I would expect they would have bookmarked for easy access. I also need to figure out a way to get some of our non-English speaking customers to be more vocal with their success. There are some good stories there. I also noticed that we have cases where knowledge was not institutionalised. Senior developers have retired and the internal replacement has been promoted but do not know everything that their predecessor did. When putting the tracks together for day 2, with only 2 tracks I was conscious that if a topic was too specialised, what would attendees do if they were not interested in that specialised topic. With single event and online events we have been able to have 4 tracks with presentations repeated. Fore future event, I will certainly be pushing to have 3 or 4 tracks on breakout day so that we can be more specialised in certain areas. That might mean some presentations are a 30-40 minute recorded video with a long Q&A session to follow. The videos produced via Synthesia were impressive. Having a day before or after for some dedicated training is also an idea we will investigate. Running labs, OLGA awards, team activities, things we did at past events we put on hold due to the event being shorter. One of the best suggestions for future events was to have a “speed-dating” type session so that you get to meet people and learn a little but more about them and their business. I was struggling how to arrange this, but then it occurred to me, in the Champions League this year you have 36 teams who are only playing 8 games, in the NFL there are 32 teams and 17 games. For the Cricket World Test Championship you have 9 teams playing 6 series. You don’t have to meet and talk with everyone. So perhaps some form of event where you don’t speak to everyone but have X minutes with Y attendees, you don’t ger paired with someone you work with, you only get paired with at most 2 Four Js employees etc etc. I know I speak fast, I have a lot to say! With slides I am conscious that we have a decent proportion of English as a second language attendees. Hence I like to include as much as what I say on a slide so that you translate the written word by reading it multiple times if necessary. With oral presentations, you only get to hear it once and you may lose context when attempting to translate. Hence don’t be scared that I have a lot of slides, I do go through them faster than on average. If you chose not to attend, please let us know what influences the decision not to attend. Is it travel cost, lack of notice, would you be more likely to attend if their was training etc. We will improve each time, good, better, best, never rest, …and we will hopefully time WWDC better in the release cycle so that as per the roadmap, after 6.00 is released, we are using WWDC to educate you on what is new in 6.00. So if you need to stick something in your budget keep an eye on the roadmap, look when a release is scheduled to occur and think a WWDC will probably follow.
Benefits of Attending
There is unrecorded demand out there
The regions are different
Two tracks are limiting
“Speed-Dating”
Miscellaneous
Final thoughts