PRAGMA CONF #14

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The iOS and OS X Developers Conference

Past Saturday I had the chance to attend Pragma Conference (organized by the PragmaMark guys). I was supposed to be quite far away from Italy at that time, but a series of events made me stay in Milan and the lucky invite by Klaus brought me to not only the biggest, but currently the one and only Italian iOS Developers Conference.

I attended PragmaConf past year; I really have to say I am very pleased by the amazing improvements that have been made. The quality of the talks has risen, so the catering. The location was very pretty: the Enterprise Hotel in Milan. The furniture was inspired by Indian-like atmospheres and decor, huge decorated elephants were placed here and there and their bathrooms featured nacre red pearl tiles. Wow.

So I arrived at the convention place, said hello to Klaus (who was the tallest guy with the biggest smile there so quite easy to recognize if you’re looking for him) and started the day.

Here’s my badge: the design is enjoyable (nobody ever pays attention to the graphics, while they are very important imho) and on the back there was the full program, so one could just turn the badge and read what was next. Smart move. We got nifty gadgets: a tshirt, a bag and DuckMa + Github stickers.

Talks were divided in two rooms, just like past year: two different talks at the same time, for a grand total of 16 seminars throughout the day. This has its prons and cons: you may want to attend both conferences while you’re at it but have to choose one. It’s quite easy to sneak into the other room if you find out the speech is not what you expected, so it’s okay. I had quite clear ideas and was undecided regarding couple of talks only, but it went well nonetheless ☺

I decided to attend “Behaviours: a way to simplify your application code” by Krysztof Zabłocki, which was very interesting and I appreciated the “hands on” part with the great slides. Not sure when I will be able to actually put behaviours to use, however I would like to give it a try as soon as possible.

We had to swap rooms for the next talk, and since we finished a bit early I also attended a bunch of minutes of Meng To’s “iOS Design and Prototyping” talk. Enough to make me curious about it and make me want to download the slides ☺

Second talk I attended was “Inside RubyMotion” — I have a thing for Ruby as I would like to give it a try, however I never really had the chance to. RubyMotion by Laurent Sansonetti inspired me and the talk was fun. This guy got some sense of humor. The talk was easy, fun and very explanatory. Plus, demonstrative live coding ahoy!

The break has been, must say, one of the most appreciated revelations. Real nespresso coffee machines available, which really added something different. Cookies were available as well as other drinks for a little, relaxing break. However, I mean, real coffee. Italians are very picky on this; it’s the first time I experience such an organization. Kudos, guys.

Time to get back into the rooms, in time for “Functional Programming in Swift” by Chris Eidhof. I was really looking forward this talk since I’ve read about it and my expectations have been not left unattended. I am a fan of functional programming; most probably because I started out with it (see LISP dialects and such). I see there’s an hype going on lately about functional programming; wonder what it will bring to the whole community. Learning functional is cool and, even if you’re not really using it, it helps you thinking out of the box when it comes to OOP. However, back to Swift. Very interesting talk, with lots of code rolling. Great work Chris.

Fourth talk of the day’s time: “Seamless device communication” by Hannes Verlinde, who live-coded a small demo in Swift with zero trouble and fun results. I really love live coding. I like people who do it.