0002 – Not This Year

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With a cheeky tease from Siri and official announcement Apple has set the dates for WWDC 2016. I distinctly remember pouring over WWDC pages every year since 2008[1] and knowing there was no reason for me to go, yet really wanting to. 2016 is going to be more of the same, unfortunately.

That said, I’m making progress! I stuck to my calendar commitments both Friday night and Sunday night and put in a total of 5.5 hrs of work. I’m using the Fourth Edition of The iOS Apprentice as my tutor to kick start things. I’m sure that once completed I’ll still need to find and buy more resources to flesh out my skills. It is, however, the best course I’ve found for someone to jump start their education. The course is structured around building 4 full apps and covering the basics along the way. This is working much better for me than other books I’ve tried which start in pure concept.

This is my third attempt at completing this series. In the time I spent Friday and Sunday night I have already caught up to where I was when I last left off a few months ago. I can already feel a huge difference in going slower in larger dedicated blocks of time. I’ve also started keeping the documentation browser in Xcode open and reading the beginning blurb about things like UITableView and such. I’ve also been stopping and Googling as I go to find some more high level explanations of concepts like delegation and what override does in front of a function declaration.

I have also found it more helpful this time around to put 6–10 new lines between each thing (function declaration, function call, variable declaration, etc) in my code files. It’s wasteful once you know what you’re doing, but super helpful to keep things straight as I figure it out. The last thing I’ve also been doing is hopping over to Tweetbot and dropping some tweets to keep things more fun:


So no, I’m not attending WWDC this year.

But, next year?

  1. 2008 being the year I fell head over heels for everything Apple. First-gen iPod touch and a tricked out 15" MacBook Pro (pre-unibody).  ↩