Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@JimRoepcke
Created April 23, 2013 17:43
Show Gist options
  • Save JimRoepcke/5445746 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save JimRoepcke/5445746 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Letter to the Apple Developer Program regarding last night's developer site outage.
Last night the developer site went offline. It should come as no surprise that this immediately sent many people into panic mode thinking WWDC tickets would be available when the site came back online.
I didn't get to go to WWDC last year because tickets went on sale while I was sleeping, so this year I've signed up for every service I can find to tell me when tickets go on sale, and I run scripts to check the WWDC site. Everyone knows that if WWDC is capped at 5K tickets as it has been, they'll sell out in record time this again year.
You guys are just as aware of this as the rest of us are.
And yet, despite knowing that tickets weren't going to be for sale when the site returned, you chose not to communicate this to the thousands of Apple developers on Twitter that had become chained to their computers last night in anticipation.
This is totally disrespectful. I understand why ticket sales aren't pre-announced, but please don't make this any worse than it has to be. If you're going to take the site offline, and it's not for the purpose of announcing tickets that evening, please just make a quick statement on Twitter to that effect so that people don't have to sacrifice even more of their time for nothing.
I had plans for last night that I had to cancel at the last minute because I fairly believed I couldn't be away from my computer during that time. Had the tickets been made available, fair ball, no problem, but they weren't and now I feel taken advantage of.
Secrecy is one thing, but there was no secret to keep in this case. Please treat developers' time with more respect in the future.
Thank you,
Jim
Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment