iOSConf 2017

iOSCon 2017

iOSCon is a 2 conference in London for people interested in iOS development and the Swift programming language.  I got the chance to attend with a few people from Digital Products who work on our apps like MyO2, O2 Drive and Priority.   I was rather looking forward to going as I have had my feet out of the iOS development circle for a while.  Working in the Lab requires you to jump around from technology to technology, each project could be written in a completely different programming language, tool or involve no coding at tall.

The conference covered things like:

  • New design patterns / ways to architect your app (VIPER, VIP and Clean to Flux, Redux and Reactive, POP)
  • Better ways to do API calls(Protocol Buffers and GraphQL) ,
  • How to get started in functional reactive programming,
  • Better ways to do Test Driven Development (some people call it Test Driven Design) by using Swift Playgrounds.
  • A few talks on accessibility and how to debug it.

What was interesting about this conference compared to others was the focus on behind the scenes stuff.  Previous conferences I had attended featured a lot of talks on UI, user experience, building custom controls etc.  This conference focused on making your code more stable, structured and easier to test.

You can find most of the talks here for free: https://skillsmatter.com/conferences/8180-ioscon-2017-the-conference-for-ios-and-swift-developers?tc=260f81#skillscasts

Here are 2 talks I really enjoyed:

It’s about time by Daniel Steinberg

This was a rather hard hitting talk about striking the right balance between work and home life.  He focuses on things like, either work or relax, don’t try to mix them, don’t go home and think of work. He tries to get you to focus on why you’re doing something, not the what your doing.  He also covered planning your day better and how interruptions cost you.  Every time someone bothers you for a minute, it takes 23 minutes to recover, even if it’s you who caused the interruption.

If you’re interested in watching the talk, check the link below, warning it may make you rethink things a bit.

https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/9447-keynote-it-s-about-time#video

The second talk I really enjoyed was

Natural Swift: write Swift the way it was meant to be written by Paul Hudson

The talk focuses on 3 topics which together can really help you improve your code.  The first is POP (Protocol oriented Programming), the second is Functional Programming which focused on the map, flatmap, filter and reduce commands.  These really impressed me because they can do in 1 line of code, what I would usually do in 5.  The last topic he covered was value types,  ObjectiveC is very different to Swift and you need to know what is a value type and what’s a reference type.

Sadly this talk was not filmed by Skillscast however you can download it for free from https://gumroad.com/l/natural-swift

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