Out of Cheese

Jonathan “Wolf” Rentzsch is the first to announce that MacHack will stick to its scheduled date of June 19-21. When Apple moved WWDC last week to the week of June 23rd, the MacHack crew was left wondering what to do. Apparently they’ve decided that enough people will attend if they stick with their original schedule.

I’ve noted at TidBITS and elsewhere that people are concerned that Apple employees won’t be able to attend MacHack if WWDC is immediately after it. While I can’t speak for anyone else at Apple, that concern seems somewhat misplaced to me. Apple employees who aren’t directly involved in WWDC presentations aren’t tied to Cupertino immediately before the conference. I won’t be giving a talk at WWDC, so I’m free to head off to MacHack and speak there. I think the same is true for the other Apple speakers, but I can’t be certain.

I am concerned that developers won’t be too keen on flying to Michigan for three days, then flying to San Francisco and returning home. One-way plane tickets are expensive. I’m sure the MacHack organizers realized that, though, and found that it didn’t outweigh the cost of moving the conference. Personally, I’ll miss being able to talk to people about Panther, and I wonder if Metrowerks will discuss CodeWarrior Pro 9 before WWDC. But it’ll still be a tremendously fun conference — at no other time or place can you find such an impressive collection of Mac programmers, all doing nothing except talking about, and writing code for, Mac OS X.

If you haven’t signed up for MacHack yet and you’re thinking of going to WWDC but find it a bit expensive, I’d really encourage you to attend MacHack. It’s not like WWDC in that you don’t have Apple talking to the crowd; instead, you get to meet all kinds of people from many different areas of expertise who are doing tons of interesting things. It’s a terrific way to make connections, or even just to put faces to the names that you see in various forums online. If you’ve never been to MacHack before, now’s a great time to start.