Learning from the pros - WWDC 2011

AUT Creative Tech student Judit Klein was awarded a scholarship to this years' Worldwide Developers Conference in San Francisco. Photo / Supplied

Opinion

New Zealanders go to Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference every year, usually developers. Acolytes would go (not to say that some developers don't fall into this category) if it wasn't so expensive and hard to get into - this year's sold out in record time and it's not cheap to attend. Especially from here.

Judit Klein is just 20, but managed to get there this year - Judit's been here since she was three but was born in Hungary, and was just back from a family holiday in the land of her birth when she had to jump a plane again, this one en route to San Francisco.

While Judit now considers herself a 'real Apple fan', she actually only started using Macs when she began her degree at AUT. "Before that, I just used whatever people gave me, or lent me."

The degree she's undertaking primes people in all sorts of fields without a fixed career path in mind. The course combines art, robotics, design, coding, sound ... it's a combination of computer science, engineering and visual arts. It may seem an odd tertiary choice, but the Creative Technologies degree is hard to get into and has been expanding since it started.

"When I finished high school, I was looking for a degree that didn't tell me what I was going to be when I came out of it. But I always had a bit of a maths brain so I took to coding immediately."

She thinks one of the really great strengths of the degree is learning problem solving.

Judit is in her third and final year of the Bachelor of Creative Technologies at the Auckland University of Technology (AUT).

For the degree, all students have the option to lease MacBook Pros. It was in her second semester of the second year that Judit got the bug to develop iApps after working in a team of five to develop an interactive iPhone tour guide for the Auckland Art Gallery.

And Judit only heard about WWDC last year when she sat in on a talk presented by two Renaissance employees to first year students.

That's when she also heard about the Apple University Consortium, which offers scholarships for students and staff to attend the San Francisco conference.

After filling out the complex forms required, Judit was very pleased to get one of the coveted student scholarships. She was the only student from New Zealand to get a competitive student scholarship, of 20 made available to Australians and New Zealanders, with the support of her local AUC coordinator (Stanley Frielick).

"There aren't many students there [at WWDC]. And I think students can take a lot away from it." For example, "I've done a lot of theoretical research this semester and I'm dying to get back into coding. So I want inspiration and the technical skills to turn my research into something practical."

Dave Hayward from Cyclone and Kelly Eyerman from Ingram Micro took the NZ AUC attendees (including the Competitive Staff and Allocated Staff Scholarship recipients) out to dinner one night, "And that was really nice."

Generally, "WWDC was definitely one of the best experiences of my life. There's no better opportunity to learn directly from the people who develop the tools and software I use every day. And interacting with lots of like-minded people and finding out what everyone does ... it's important to make those contacts."

And Judit saw the Steve Jobs keynote. "I got out of bed at 3am and got into the queue by 4am. I was number 300-and-something in the line and stayed in it for about six hours, but that's all part of the experience." And it was all worth it.

(There's a picture here, by Judit).

"The person who yelled out 'We love you Steve!' from the audience pretty much summed it up."

A lot of the guest presenters they brought in for lunchtime sessions were outstanding, Judit says, singling out that by Dr Michael B Johnson from Pixar and the final session hosted by astronaut Buzz Aldrin.

"Talk about looking at the wider picture! Really inspirational speakers."

And iOS5 will have much to offer, but Judit is bound by non disclosure agreement.

"Put it this way: a lot of what they've done for developers is going to make it a lot easier. It was in the closed afternoon sessions on the Monday after the keynote, when they explained what it meant to developers, that I got really excited."

Back here in New Zealand, Judit's considering Post Grad.

- Mark Webster mac-nz.com