In June, my colleague and I boarded a plane bound for San Francisco and the 2012 Apple World Wide Developer Conference. A small snafu early on led to a nail biting week-long wait to discover if we’d actually managed to successfully purchase tickets but, fortunately, everything came together in the end.

My second such event, WWDC 2012 proved just as exciting and rewarding as the first. As someone who now has limited opportunity to do hands-on software development, it’s refreshing to learn about new language features, methodologies and tools, and to take the time to explore the architectural direction of OS X and iOS. Needless to say, Apple are doing very interesting things with both these platforms and Objective C.

San Francisco itself never fails to provide a wonderful and welcoming atmosphere and, during our time out there, we were able to enjoy the Haight-Ashbury Street Fair, some fantastic food and, in my case, a trip past Alcatraz and onwards to Sausalito.