For me, today was long, stressful, tiring, but also very exciting and upbeat day. I have traveled from Prague to San Francisco (over 13 hours spent in airplanes), and I have, for the first time in my life, seen San Francisco in all its glory with my own eyes. And boy, it really is Something.
But let’s put this into context a little bit. For over 3 years, I have dreamt about attending WWDC and getting the chance to see (and live) San Francisco with my own eyes. But it always ended up with “the next year I’ll be there” (mostly due to money, or the tickets being sold out too fast). Well this year, I became a little bit more serious about it. I made an app that scraped wwdc site every 60 seconds and searched for specific words in the site content. It would begin to ring and vibrate the moment the site changed. Then, when Apple pre-announced the ticket sale date and time, this app obviously lost its effect, but what seemed really interesting was the WWDC Scholarship competition for students. I never paid too much attention to those competitions previous years, but now I felt like it could be a great chance to dramatically reduce the expenses of the whole WWDC trip. I decided to risk it, I didn’t even try to buy a ticket and I made an app about myself for the scholarship. And luckily, they chose me! And at that moment it was clear that this year, I am FINALLY going to be there.
I could write countless reasons here why I think it’s great to be at WWDC, but instead of that I’ll fast-forward to today, Friday 7.6.2013. It was the longest day of my life, because it had 33 hours (due to the many timezones I crossed – Prague and San Francisco are almost exactly on the opposite sides of the planet, so it’s no wonder). Like I said, the flight was quite stressful (and the check by immigration officer after landing in SFO was the last ‘icing on the cake’). I was traveling entirely alone and these people are their focus group, so I was quite nervous that there’ll be a problem, but fortunately it went well. Another thing that made the whole travel tiring was the fact that I already was tired even before the traveling – I slept 7 hours during the last 2 nights, combined. But from the moment when I got off the BART in Civic Center station, with shining sun, with the great sea air that I heard about several times before, and with my ‘childish’ happiness over finally being here (!! :D), I somehow forget about the sleep deficit altogether and just enjoyed it so much.
I am especially amazed by the rush life on the streets, by the traffic and by all those interesting (and extravagant) people that I saw (many of them) already. It simply feels like the city is breathing with really healthy lungs; it made me feel really welcomed, not at all lonely (given the fact that I am here entirely on my own and all the people that I know and love are half-world away, it doesn’t feel at all as bad as I thought it will. Right after checking into my hotel, I had to go see the Moscone Center. When I saw all the banners and finally fully realized that I am going to finally take part in it, I had to smile not only in my heart, but with my whole face. I am simply very happy that this my dream finally came true.
To finish this post off, I am incredibly happy to have the opportunity to be here, and I am anxiously looking forward to meeting all those inspiring people and seeing these spectacular sights that San Francisco has to offer during my 2 weeks stay here. If you are attending wwdc as well and would be interested in meeting up, I would be more than glad to do so. Just message me on Twitter (@luksape) and we’ll do it. Cheers!
(I’ll probably do more blog posts during these two weeks, but no promises ;).)