66 Macworld • April 2020FEATURE
perhaps just to Apple employees. They’ll certainly
provide the applause that’s required.
What’s left of WWDC, however, is the connections.
With every session streamed online, the value of
coming to San Jose is in making connections with
other people. Apple offers ‘lab sessions’ that allow
developers to connect with key Apple engineers.
This is a big deal, by far the most important thing
that happens at WWDC. For the rest of the year,
as a developer you can file bug reports about
that issue that is making your app buggy, but at
WWDC you can sit with the Apple engineer who is
in charge of that feature and explain why your app
is suffering. I can’t tell you how many stories I’ve
heard from developers about how important it was
to make contact with the people inside Apple who
affect the fate of their software.
Labs will be a tough thing to replicate, but I
think Apple needs to try. Perhaps there could
be a way to sign up for ‘office hours’ with Apple
employees in certain categories, in which you’d get
an appointment for a FaceTime call. Perhaps there
could be live Q&A sessions where key members
of various Apple teams field questions from an
online audience of developers. Creating a way for
developers to spend time with Apple people without
overwhelming them is going to be hard, but it’s
vitally important.
And who knows, maybe this event could lead to
some cultural change inside Apple. If the company
builds a system that allows developers to get time
with Apple employees without making the trek to