I've been a developer for while now... 18 years, to be exact.
I started in 1997, fresh out of university - without carrying any kind of degree, to be honest. I had learnt a lot there though: I had my first tastes of the internet there, and saw the web in its infancy, growing to a budding communication tool for a wide variety of people. And so I started in October 1997 as a web developer in an Antwerp-based company called iM@Gic. It was a fun place to work at, and we made some great sites there given the technology we had to our disposal (all coded in Perl, baby).
A tweet, 2 FaceTime interviews, a trip to Cupertino for 5 two-person interviews lasting a whole day (including lunch at the Caffé Macs), a bucketload of mails and 2 handfuls of international phonecalls.
That's what got me a job in the UIKit team at Apple.
It's safe to say it's been a crazy ride so far, and it's about to get even better.
So, it's that time of the year again. WWDC is almost upon us. Like last year, I won't be able to make it due to "agenda issues" (mainly the same as last year, but that's what happens when you have kids). But also I'm in the midst of an app release at work and as a team/tech lead it would be less than ideal to skip a week for WWDC (which is actually more than a week since there's the Jetlag Recovery Period too). So it wasn't in the stars this year.
I think I might be going again next year. Not sure if I will go for WWDC itself, but certainly for an AltWWDC experience. There's a lot of people going to SF next week which I'd really like to meet or talk to again. Sure, there's twitter, but nothing beats IRL contact. And the buzz around WWDC is just so invigourating, or at least it was in 2012, IMHO. So we'll see. I'll have some money set aside for next year, so at least that won't be a problem.
No real predictions post. You never know with Apple what they're going to produce at a developer event, so I won't go there. What I will do is list what I'd like to see. Mostly iOS stuff, because that's what I do.