WWDC25: Happy Little Accidents

I really tried to keep this one short, I swear. I also tried to finish this quickly, and that’s another issue entirely. But the week of WWDC had just too many surprises to keep it short and sweet. So if you’ve got the time, I’d suggest a cup of tea or coffee (I prefer the former).

I told someone I was going to write this blog post in a few days, but it’s now July. I feel particularly effusive with gratitude over the WWDC week I’ve experienced. Sometimes, good things really come together and you can’t help but smile. As I was talking about this with a group of friends, we invoked the good name of Bob Ross and called these some “happy little accidents”. Suffice it to say, despite my long turnaround time on this one, everything arrived right on time, just like all of us in this community. And to you who are reading, I hope you feel welcome too.

My experience in the Swift community has been one happy little accident after another, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. I went to Apple Park for the WWDC 2025 experience, and it was great. We had a defined schedule with some truly stellar events and announcements, but the rest of it? All happy little accidents.

It was a happy little accident that I got to visit the members of my old team at Apple.

It was a happy little accident that I bumped into folks I hadn’t seen in a while, and we got to deliver our words of encouragement in person.

It was a happy little accident that I got to go to some really good labs (and I actually met an old colleague in person after a history of email-only correspondence, which blew my mind).

We all talk about being members of “the community”, and that might be the happiest of accidents if you stop to think about it. I watched people greet each other with joy and then enter conversations as if they didn’t live worlds apart. You likely have some similar stories, and I hope some folks come to mind as you read this.

The week of WWDC is notoriously packed from start to finish with things to do, from meet-ups, to visits, high caliber meals, and even late nights visiting one another as you try your hardest to fight off your body’s protests that you simply must get to sleep. The fact that we’re all together and in each other is kind of a miracle if you stop and think about it.

During the big week, my friends and I debuted our event, CommunityKit, and it went extremely well. We had a great sponsor in the form of RevenueCat, who really makes a strong effort to show up for the developer community, and I cannot even begin to articulate my gratitude for all they’ve done for us. After months of planning, folks genuinely enjoyed CommunityKit and felt right at home. At the end of day one, my co-organiser Michie and I joined arms as though we were off to see the wizard, and we walked that way until we arrived at the Hilton for Students Swift Stars, which is an incredibly inspiring event that I cannot stop singing praises for. There are so many other people who create and host events like these, such as Malin and Kai’s Core Coffee. In my experience, the things that make these events so special and beloved lies within their core DNA—a desire to pay the gift of past community forward to the present. With CommunityKit, we genuinely wanted to create it as a love letter to this community because everyone involved in its creation can think of how they felt so welcome while getting started as a new developer. Now, we have that ability to pay that forward to today’s developers. There’s a cycle we’ve really nailed here, and I don’t think we talk about that enough.

Apple is legitimately listening to the community, something that’s been wondered about in many an online corner.  I would be remiss if I didn’t issue a hearty, heaping serving of thanks to Apple for all of their help with CommunityKit. They were great about answering our questions, offering advice, responding to us at odd hours, and showing genuine interest in what we were trying to accomplish. But more than that, when speaking to these folks, I was pleasantly surprised at how evident it was that they actually cared about us and what we were doing. Apple publishes a list of community-run events each year for WWDC, and at first glance, it may just look like an agenda and nothing more. Having really built a community event from the ground up, I am really touched to reports that they spend a lot of time and effort making each and every one of these groups has what they need to be successful. We genuinely could not have done it without them. So if you’re wondering if Apple cares about its developers, the answer is an emphatic yes. At the WWDC event at Apple Park, all the folks I interacted with really spoke to me with a refined intentionality that made me feel like I was the only person in the room at times. There’s so much that goes into supporting these community events and their own in-house events, and I think sometimes it’s easy to forget because we’re in a good annual groove for WWDC.

This is the part where I recall that 30 Rock meme where Alec Baldwin says to Tina Fey’s character, “It’s Wednesday, Lemon” because it’s only been three days of the WWDC experience so far. I cannot believe how fortunate I have been to do things like meet at the Apple Park Visitor Center at the drop of a hat—thank you for the umbrellas! This year, James Dempsey and the Breakpoints was a total blast, and we even got Josh Holtz on the triangle. The photos are out there, folks. My friends Ben Freiband and Matt Heaney led a code crawl from coffee shop to coffee shop on Thursday, and they were gracious enough to let me do some art for it. I think we’re starting to see a trend where activities are populating Thursday and Friday, activities worth staying for, and I’m really excited to see what continues to develop within that temporal real estate.

As the week came to a close, my friends and I were certainly worn ragged from appearing all over the city—though notably, my friend Mikaela Caron seems resistant to the wears and tears of conferences due to her extensive experience, so perhaps she knows something we don’t? Just as I loved the pace and passion that peppered the week, the weekend itself became a time for intentionality and focus with people I don’t get to see often, including my best friends Chris and Tee. The fact that we were able to make something work out is yet another happy accident, but you surely can’t be surprised by this anymore, can you? When it came time to leave the San Jose Airport, one of my favorite places to leave the ground in the body of an aircraft, I felt like my cup was totally full. I had been given the gift of time by these people who all mean so much to me.

Now here’s the kicker: happy accidents don’t make for good leftovers. If you experience happy accidents like I have, I urge you to create happy accidents for others and make their world just a little more magical if you can. When we pay kindness in our community forward, we make it a better place. And that, my friends, is no accident at all.