WWDC Parties 2015
Better late than never, right?
Today, Emily Stewart and I released the 2015 edition of our annual WWDC parties list. We’re both really excited about it, and I’d like to talk a bit about what went into it this year.
One of the things we added this year is the ability to filter events. Not everyone that attends WWDC is looking for the same thing, and we’ve had requests over the years for things outside of the “traditional” party setups. Last year was the first year that we explicitly called out whether a listed event was a party, or something else (a presentation, casual meetup, or outdoors event), but it was still hard to find those types of events in the sea of other parties on the site. This year, we’ve added a row of buttons along the top to find these types of events, or events that serve food and drink. We’ll likely tweak the list of filters from here based on feedback that we hear, so give us a shout if you’re looking for something that we don’t have.
We’ve also switched to Mapbox maps rather than Google Maps, so (fingers crossed) we won’t run out of map views halfway throughout the conference this year and have everyone looking at broken image links for three days like we did last year.
One thing that we’re still working on this year is open-sourcing the entire WWDC Parties codebase for the year. We’ve already open-sourced and documented our public API, and the website itself should be posted to Emily’s GitHub profile by the end of the conference. We’ve heard of people wanting to do similar sites for other events such as Google I/O, and we thought we could give a helping hand to those folks. I’ll probably post a post-mortem of the development of the site at that time—Emily and I completely rewrote the site this year in a language neither of us was too familiar with (Clojure), so we’ve got a lot of stories to tell.
Every year, people ask when WWDC Parties is going to launch an iOS app. Well, we were going to this year (you can see the beginnings of it on GitHub), but it fell to the side when the site rewrite took over. Instead, we recommend Parties for WWDC by Genady Okrain. Parties for WWDC even has an Apple Watch component that should help when you don’t want to be that person with their phone out at a party.
One of the things that you might notice missing so far is the “new party” page that allows people to suggest parties to be added to the list. We’re still working on it in the hopes that we can add it in this year, but until then, if you know of a party that’s not listed, or notice something wrong with a party that’s already listed, hit us up on Twitter or drop me an e-mail. Either Emily or I will try to respond ASAP.
Have fun at WWDC this year!