"You've won a WWDC18 Scholarship."

Dear Jordan Osterberg,

Congratulations! You’ve been awarded a WWDC18 Scholarship, which includes a ticket to the conference, lodging for the week, and one year of membership in the Apple Developer Program.

Let's back up for a moment. Back to 2016. I had just started learning Swift, how to build iOS apps, and Apple had just announced WWDC16. At this time I had roughly 3 weeks of developer experience with Swift. I'll obviously get in, right? This year was funky, because I really didn't prioritize it and I ended up not submitting anything at all. This wasn't a worry for me, I would just apply and get in next year!

Or so I thought. Nope! I had much more development experience this time around, however Apple requested we build using a platform I had little experience in. This, combined with performance issues with my submission, landed me a rejection for this year's scholarship. This sucked. I had been really looking forward to going to WWDC that year and the rejection email hit like a bus. I set a goal that next year, I would put forth 10x the effort as I had in 2017.

You can see my post about implementing Accessibility into this year's submission here, in which I go over some bits and pieces as to how I built my submission. Here is a video of part of my submission.

4/20/18

No, that is not a weed joke. That's the day Apple had set as judgement day, where all of the applicants would be notified of their status. An email with the subject line of "Your WWDC Scholarship Status" meant you had been hit with a rejection. The entire week I had been lowering my outlook, trying to lessen the blow that I knew was eventually coming.

I couldn't focus at all the entire school day, keeping the Slack channel that other applicants chat on open in all of my classes. Lunch hit, I had ordered a pizza to either celebrate or recover. I walked up to the office, waiting for a pizza that was supposed to arrive at 12:15. It was 12:30, and no pizza arrived. I took a look at the Slack channel (I had it open on my phone) and saw the onslaught of emails from Apple with statuses. (Side-note: I had removed my email account I submitted with from my phone and MacBook Pro so I wouldn't prematurely see the email from a notification. I wanted to go out on my own terms.)

I logged into my email provider's web portal, and there I saw it.

"You've won a WWDC18 Scholarship."

I worked myself to death over this thing, every free moment I got was dedicated to building my submission.

It appears my hard work has paid off :)

I'll be writing articles throughout the week of the conference (June 4th to 8th) on the new technologies, and at the end of the week I'll post an article on my entire experience.