Deep Dish Swift - Day 2
May 1, 2023
conference
Deep Dish Swift Day 1 was one afternoon filled with amazing talks and getting the chance to meet many nice people from the community, ending with a deep dish pizza feast at Giordano’s. Let’s get Day 2 going.
Peter Steinberger
Opening Keynote - There And Back Again
Peter from PSPDFKit talked about how he sold his company, and how the last two years have been the hardest of his life. Starting his first app out of rage, and later his first company, Peter founded PSPDFKit, which over time has turned into a pretty big thing.
This talk was not a success story of formula 1A talk, rather the opposite. It was a many-faceted, rich and deeply touching description about what it’s like to start a company, reach success and start to grow, then feeling the loss of control as more people are brought in, having to battle with separating your identity from your company and product, conflicts, burning out etc. Eventually, selling the thing you’ve identified with for so long can have some nasty surprises up its sleeve. Who are you when you sell a large part of who you consider yourself to be? Who are you in that deep void, when you have no sense of purpose?
This talk went deep and dark, but ended with thoughts and insights on how to cope and how to start finding yourself again after such a journey.
I loved it.
Danijela Vrzan
Algorithms: Where No Developer Wants To Go
Daniela followed up Peter’s keynote with a super fun and insightful talk on algorithms, and how the Swift standard library has algorithms that can help make your code faster, better and more concise.
Daniela showed how to use and chain many of the standard library algorithms like map, compactMap and flatMap and also demoed a few that can be found in the Swift Algorithms package. It was heavy on code, so I will not try to summarize it, but whether you are an experienced Swift developer or just started learning, this is a great and very fun watch.
Ben Scheirman
Algorithms: Modular Architecture with Swift
Ben talked about modular architecture, what modularization is, the importance of understanding the impact of dependencies and some tools and approaches to make it all work.
This talk was fun and went through many important aspects of modularized software in great detail, but having focused much of my work life on this kind of work and challenges, there was little new for me personally to be found. However, if you are interested in system design, modularization etc. it’s a must.
Via Fairchild
What is mentorship and why you’re ready to be a mentor
Via talked about her rough time as a single mother, trying to make ends meet, and how a single friend in the world of iOS development helped her change her life by transitioning to tech.
Via’s story was very personal and touching, and she took great care in thanking all the amazing people in this community who have helped out along the way. As a seasoned and self-going developer, it’s so easy to forget the early days and how important role models and mentors. and the occasional unconditional helping hands, truly are. Thank you for reminding me, Via!
Marc Aupont
Unlocking the Power of Swift Playgrounds
Marc started talking about his life and developer journey. During his work, he’s seen that everyone has the power to create…but are the tools accessible? Getting a MacBook to start developing and an iPhone to test what you create is a pretty steep hill to climb. You’ve already spent $3000 before even starting.
From this perspective, the iPad and Swift Playgrounds is a groundbreaking alternative that lets you develop in Swift on even the most basics of iPad models, trying what you build on the same device. It’s not only more accessible when it comes to price, is a much less tech heavy setup, which opens up the world of development to even more people.
Marc them demonstrated Swift Playgrounds and how to create, share and distribute a Swift Playground Book. I didn’t know about this concept nor about the Swift Playground Book Store, but it looks really cool! With this and many great features like being able to drag code from code examples into the source code area, Apple seems to have created a very powerful and accessible tool.
Vui Nguyen
Make Porting Custom SwiftUI Design Elements Easy With Swift Packages
Viu talked about how to set up a local package structure and use packages to provide handle things like custom colors and fonts and let you apply them as you would with the native colors and fonts.
As I’ve basically lived and breathed Swift Packages for many years now, I wasn’t the target audience of this talk, but if you are new to Swift Packages, I’m sure there are some useful insights here.
Discussion
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