Apple does love us
I went to the ServerSide.Swift conference in London and survived to tell the tale. This is one article of a series of articles about my experiences in London. Some might be more technical; some might just be impressions. I hope you enjoy them.
For a long time, Apple has been a company that mainly operated in the US, at least from the developer’s perspective Therefore, the annual WWDC also always has been an expensive dream for developers based in Europe or elsewhere in the world.
After all you need to pay for the flights, the hotel and the ticket to attend it, which can add up to be a lot. When I tried to plan a trip there once, it would have cost me around 8000 to 10,000€ — not to mention the challenge of getting a ticket first.
So, let’s just say it was too expensive.
The pandemic changed the equation somewhat as Apple decided to switch to a remote-first conference, so everyone around the world could at least somehow experience it. Us in Europe were only able to watch the sessions after work and all night long!
But this time Apple came to us. Not only did they sponsor the ServerSide.swift conference in London but also sent engineers to attend the conference. And let me tell you, those engineers are humans too!
I talked to a few of them and each was a delight to talk with. Dave, for example, was eager to hear our thoughts on the new WWDC format and pointed out several channels that we could use to get in contact with Apple beyond WebEx and the WWDC itself. He also seemed surprised that we weren’t aware of many of the new channels.
During our conversation, I also pitched my idea for more visibility for accessibility in the App Store and he liked the Idea. Who knows, maybe we will see this improvement in the future😘.
Anyways, it was great to see Apple invested in the community, especially in the server-side-swift domain. Because let’s be honest — if you don’t work with server-side-swift in production, you probably don’t know of any product that uses it😇
We have not seen a lot of engagement from Apple on the server-side portion of the Swift language over the past years. Finally, there were a few sessions about this “pet project” from Apple at last year’s WWDC. I call it “pet project” since there are no visible companies actually using it and at least for me it is hard to sell a technology, that is not used by anyone known.
That is why I was pleasantly surprised to see Apple engineers at the conference. It gave me hope. And Apple really knocked it out of the park by having Tony Parker present the new open-source implementation of Foundation. This blew my mind, and I will cover why in another article.
Overall, after the ServerSide.Swift-Conference, I see Apple in a different light and am looking forward to what they have planned in the future, especially on the backend-side.
That is it for today. Thank you for reading and keep an eye out for my next article.
