On January 29th, we, iOS developers @ Tapptic, attended dotSwift 2018, a conference focusing on Swift and iOS development that occurs every year since 2016 in Paris. For this edition, the conference took place at the Théâtre de Paris, situated in the 9e arrondissement.

 

This year was a special year for dotSwift : the promoters were extremely happy to announce that Ben Cohen, member of the Swift Core Team at Apple, will be giving a talk at the conference. For the record, it is the very first time that someone from the Swift Core Team appeared at a community event in Europe.

 

Alongside Ben Cohen, dotSwift’s speakers lineup looked very exciting: Paul Hudson – author of Hacking with Swift, Ben Sheirman – Screencaster at NSSreencast, Brandon Kase – Cryptocurrency hacker at O(1) Lab but also Ellen Shapiro, Graham Lee and Sally Shepard, covering various topics such as coordinators, protocol extensions and functional programming. The talks followed the same structure seen at TED conferences, with talks from maximum 18 minutes and after each talk, the opportunity for the speaker to sit down and have a small discussion with Daniel Steinberg, the guest MC at dotSwift, asking them lots of questions to go into more details or on specifics topics.

 

Alongside the main speakers, a few lightning talks also took place, with a duration of 4min and about various subjects such as ARKit, end-to-end encryption or binary frameworks in Swift.

 

Our favorite talks were Ellen Shapiro’s about Protocol Oriented Programming with real life life examples and Ben Cohen’s about how to submit a good standard library addition.

 

Ellen Shapiro gives us really concrete examples of cases where we should use protocol with default implementations, conditional default protocol implementation extension or again protocol extension with multiple where clauses. She also gives us some tips about when you should subclass and when protocols are more appropriated.

 

Ben Cohen’s talk deserve a particular mention because it shows that Apple is trying to adopt a much more open policy now than it was the case a few years ago. By sending a developer like Ben, who is working at Cupertino, to Swift conferences around the world to talk with developers, it is a good step for a company like Apple to show that with Swift being an open source project, they are keen to be part of the community and encourage developers to contribute and help make Swift a better langage.

 

Also worth mentioning there was no Wi-Fi at the conference : unlike most coding conferences, attendees were requested to close their laptop and turn off their phones, which result of a very focused audience, with no multi-tasking or chatting on Slack.

 

We were glad to attend the conference and we spent a wonderful time in Paris. The organisation was almost perfect, the venue was really beautiful and a great general community vibe.

 

Omar Belhaouss and Raphaël Grau

iOS developers @ Tapptic Belgium

 

Picture taken at dotSwift 2018 in Paris on January 29, 2018 by Nicolas Ravelli