Vancouver Teen Among 7 Canadian Winners of WWDC 2014 Scholarships [u]

Every year Apple awards worthy students WWDC Scholarships, which essentially are free tickets to the company’s developer conference, worth $1599 USD.

This year, seven student winners are representing Canada down in San Francisco as recipients of the WWDC 2014 Scholarship, where only 200 are available. Students had to create an app and submit it to Apple, where the latter decided on the winners.

One winner from Vancouver is 16-year old Douglas Bumby, who gets to skip school for the week as he drove down to California with his grandparents for WWDC, according to the Vancouver Sun:

“I’m really excited, I’m looking forward to the labs and how to implement the new stuff … I would like to work at Apple as a software engineer or designer one day,”

Bumby told the Canadian Press he spent 60-70 hours on his app which took him just over 7 days to create. He says a grade 2 computer class got him interested in technology and coding—from there he learned basic HTML, then years later moved onto the C programming language and Objective-C:

“With C and Objective-C I learned everything from YouTube, I spent an entire summer at a computer just watching tutorials, that was pretty much my days,”

“I’ve always been around and immersed in technology, it’s one of my hobbies — one of my only hobbies now to be honest.”

The other six Canadian student winners are: Martin Bestawros, Jaiten Gill, Indragie Karunaratne, Bruce Li, Jaxon Stevens and Ishan Thukral. Update: Kaleb Butt from Vancouver was also a student winner.

Well done to these hardworking students and getting selected by Apple for a WWDC Scholarship. That’s going to be one unforgettable experience.