After trying for years, I am heading to WWDC this year for the first time. I understand that there are a ton of – non-Apple events that happen at the same time, but I am heading to WWDC not those other events. I will be going to a few events in the evenings, but I really want to experience the full WWDC event.

The two things I am looking forward to are talking to engineers on both AutoLayout and on CoreData. I’ve been working on a new app lately, and really banging my head on understand how CoreData and the UI work together. I find that a lot of the power of Swift is to hide fundamental details of CoreData to let you focus on the application, but to me understanding how the computer is actually processes things is key. One secret that took me years to understand was how do windowing environments work. What finally helped me grasp the concepts was thinking back to how RPG work on IBM’s midrange computers. There was this thing called “the cycle”, where all programs actually ran top to bottom, for every record in a file. The idea of the cycle helped me understand that windowing environments just processed all the messages in sequence – like every record in the cycle. Bingo! I am now pretty comfortable programming windowing environments.

I haven’t gotten that ah-a moment with CoreData yet. Perhaps talking to the sets of engineers will help me make the leap into CoreData. All the great people on the iOS Slack channel, who are familiar with CoreData, seem to be big fans of it. There has to be a reason…. I hope I find it.