So the WWDC ticket emails went out this week, and mine was the bad kind. Not the "you're in, see you at Moscone West June 2nd" kind, the other one, the "thanks for your interest, please enjoy watching the keynote livestream from your couch like everyone else" kind. I've refreshed my inbox probably forty times since Monday.
For anyone who doesn't follow this stuff closely: Apple changed how WWDC tickets work this year. It used to be pure first-come-first-served, and it was brutal. I remember 2013, sitting at my desk with two browser tabs open at 5:58am Pacific, hitting refresh like a maniac, and the whole thing sold out in something like two minutes flat while the store page just choked and threw errors at half the people trying to buy. This year Apple scrapped that entirely. You had a window a few days back to submit your info, and then it was a random drawing from everyone who applied and met the developer program requirements. Winners started getting notified Monday. Losers (hi) are apparently still trickling in through this week.
I don't hate the lottery idea, honestly, even though it didn't work out for me. The scramble-for-tickets model always rewarded people with the fastest internet, the least jittery trackpad finger, and zero obligations at 6am on a Thursday morning. That's not really a meritocracy, it's just a speed test, and it filtered out a ton of people who'd have gotten a lot out of the conference but happened to be in a meeting or asleep or on a plane. A raffle at least gives everyone the same odds regardless of your wifi. My buddy Dave, who does contract iOS work and has been going every year since 2011, got picked. He's already texting me about hotel rooms near Moscone like he wasn't already planning that a month ago.
Where the lottery falls apart a little, for me, is the price tag doesn't move. It's still $1,599 whether you win a random drawing or fought tooth and nail for it, and there's something that feels a bit off about paying that much for something that's now explicitly a game of chance rather than a thing you can control by being prepared. At least with the old system, if you were organized and fast, you had actual agency over the outcome. Now you can do everything right and still just lose.
Anyway. I wasn't holding my breath for tickets this year regardless, I do mostly backend and infra stuff, not native iOS or OS X development, so WWDC was always more of a "nice to have, get to see some talks and maybe bump into people whose blog posts I read" thing than a professional necessity for me. If I'd gotten in I'd have gone, no question, but I'm not devastated. What I am a little annoyed about is that the videos from the sessions used to go up pretty quickly after each day wraps, and last year there was a stretch where some of them took what felt like forever to get posted. If that happens again this June I'm going to be cranky about it in a much longer post than this one.
The other thing nagging me is that the whole appeal of these developer conferences, going back to when I first started paying attention to them, was always partly the code and partly just being in a room with people who care about the same weirdly specific problems you do. You don't really get that from a stream, no matter how good the audio is. Dave's going to come back with three weeks of stories about hallway conversations and I'm going to nod along from three thousand miles away feeling vaguely left out, same as most years.
If you got picked, congratulations, go eat something ridiculous at the taco truck outside Moscone for me. If you didn't, well, at least we can commiserate over the stream together, assuming the stream doesn't buckle under the load the way it sometimes does during the keynote. I've got a feeling June 2nd is going to be a very refresh-heavy morning either way.