It’s my last day at Apple Park for my seventh in-person WWDC, and as I’m waiting for my final briefing just outside the Steve Jobs Theater – ever so magnificent in its polish, and yet always so strangely calm a place – I keep returning to a thought that’s been circling my head, begging for attention. I’ve never felt so “in between” phases of my career. Physically in this very moment, of course, as I’m literally sitting on an also-polished wooden bench overlooking one side of the ring, watching groups of people climb the hill to the theater and others leave. But more so mentally, insofar as I don’t recall another WWDC that’s made me feel so aware of how much things are changing around me.
At my first WWDC in San Francisco in 2016, I didn’t feel like I belonged. I was a 28-year-old blogger from Italy and somehow found my way to the most important event about the software I loved writing about. It was uncomfortable: what was I even doing there, taking notes on an iPad while folks from The New York Times or Wall Street Journal prepared articles that millions of people would read? But I didn’t mind it. I was in the middle of change; the discomfort fueled me.
10 years later, as an almost 38-year-old blogger from Italy who’s wondering just how, exactly, Apple managed to hide speakers playing music in the bushes outside the Steve Jobs Theater, I look at the content creators who are possibly experiencing their first WWDC, and realize: how am I still here, and still taking notes on an iPad, while these younger folks are shooting videos that millions of people will watch? I’m in between changes again, but I don’t mind it. The challenge still feeds me. I’m more comfortable now, but – miraculously – I don’t feel cynical or jaded. Some people are into that sort of attitude; I’ve always preferred to put in the work to be critical and enthusiastic about the things I like. In a world of complaints, optimism is a skill.
The music is still mysteriously coming from somewhere around the bushes. My friend Myke walks out the theater and tells me I’m going to love the session downstairs about AI on the Mac. “Who would have thought I’d be into that someday”, I think to myself.
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John
