KUALA LUMPUR, May 31 — Next week, Apple developers from all over the world will be attending the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Jose, California.
Happening from June 4-8, it is where developers get the rundown on the latest in Apple technology, straight from the source.
Getting there is tricky because the competition is so fierce, a lottery system is in place to make the process fairer as WWDC tickets sell out way too fast when put on open sale.
Apple’s WWDC Scholar program,me however, gives a chance to aspiring young developers to gain admission and sponsorship to Apple’s biggest developer event. Places are limited and much-coveted.
Last year, I spoke to two-time WWDC Scholar Chan Jing Hong about his experience getting into WWDC. (He made it in again, by the way)
This year, he’s joined by Brenda Lau, an IT student from Asia Pacific University, majoring in mobile technology.
From paper to mobile
Lau was encouraged by her mentor at Apptivity Lab, Jason Khong, to try out for the program and she submitted her application during her final week as a student before graduating.
“I wanted to work on the latest technologies from Apple and I had taken an interest in CoreML,” Lau said when asked about what inspired her submission.
CoreML is Apple’s machine learning framework that enables developers to add machine learning elements into their apps.
Having a keen interest in arts and crafts, she incorporated that into her project – an interactive program to teach origami. She started off by working with CoreML alongside the Vision framework, using a basic model to identify simple objects.
“I wasn’t satisfied with something that simple… I needed something unique,” Lau said. She then decided to train her own model to identify the various steps and folds used in creating an origami crane. Lau referred to Apple’s own documentation on CoreML and Vision, as well as her own training in Swift to build her model.
Being a novice, Lau knew she was taking a risk as she had never tried to train her own machine learning model before. Part of the process involved taking over a thousand images of origami folds, angles as well as photos with obstructions in the way of her photos.
All this to help "teach" her model to recognise the origami techniques in real life.
Her advice to aspiring WWDC scholars: “Go for it. Don’t be afraid of failure; instead, learn from it. I feel that a lot of my peers (including myself) always hold themselves back from even trying.”
Lau credits her mentor Khong for his encouragement, without which, she confessed, she might not even have attempted the project.
As for future aspirations, Lau said that her aspiration from a young age was to help make people’s lives better.
“So as a software developer, I want to create apps and programs that can do that!”
A direction for young dreamer/developers
I also took some time to catch up with Khong, who I also spoke to at the last WWDC, about the current local developers’ scene and what it held for young, aspiring programmers.
On what separates Malaysian developers from the rest: “There’s probably not that much of a difference in skillsets between young developers here in Malaysia vs the rest of the world. They’ve all grown up with technology. Access to information is no better or worse here in Malaysia compared to elsewhere.
"What is interesting with these young developers is the stories that they end up telling with the use of technology that’s in their hands.”
Khong cited Lau’s submission as an instance where she took her own childhood experience folding paper cranes as a pastime as an impetus for her to create a program to facilitate other people in learning origami basics. “When technology is used as a tool to express ideas, it goes as far as a young person’s imagination can take them,” he said.
A frequent WWDC attendee, Khong said the event was a great place for young developers.
“These young developers get to be inspired, not only by the new technology and more experienced industry participants, but also by each other. In a world stage like this, every young developer is pushing the boundaries on what is possible with existing technology.”
To get the most out of WWDC, Khong says that it went further than just passively attending sessions.
“Meet people, openly show them your existing projects, show up at code sessions to go hands on, show up at events held by tech startups around the conference,” he said. “You never know who you’ll meet, whether it’s an engineer who invented Swift (the programming language) or the person calling the shots on your favourite Apple product!”
* Apple will be streaming the WWDC keynote "live" from San Jose, so look out for it June 4, 10am PST (1am June 5, Tuesday in Malaysian time).
