A trip to #ForwardSwift ‘17
This was my first time attending ForwardSwift in San Francisco, which runs concurrently with the ForwardJS web conference. The conferences are one whole day of talks during a week of associated all day workshops.
The Swift conference was full of diverse topics ranging from opinions on Storyboard usage, genetic algorithms with Rubik’s Cubes, a performance discussion through playing Beatles audio backwards and the many facets of testing iOS. Videos from previous conferences (and presumably eventually this one) can be found on https://forwardcourses.com. One of my favorite talks was from Shruti Malugu (@shrutimalugu) on iMessage extensions. Sticker packs account for about 80% of extensions, which require basically no code and can help drive your app downloads. I happened to be sitting next to someone working at NBC Universal on the Today Show app. As I’d been neglecting iMessage extensions myself, I installed the Today Show sticker pack and treated my mom to a large Matt Lauer iMessage sticker (#conferenceSideEffects). Interestingly, Shruti worked on an iMessage extension using React Native which enabled Android users to participate in some aspects of the extension. I’m also looking forward to trying out PropellerKit from Propeller labs. Rich Fox (@RGfox) presented on how it can be used for handling TableViews with less boilerplate code and ultimately making iOS development faster. For a more detailed take on all the conference topics, I recommend speaker Lizzie Siegle’s awesome post.
Initially on hearing about the conference I was primarily interested in the workshops. I attended Samer Buna’s “Getting Started with React.js” and Paul Hudson’s “Server Side Swift.” Samer’s class was a great introduction to React, and I’d recommend trying out his JS playground at jsComplete as well as his other online workshops. The workshops at Forward are all hands-on, and together we built a few simple apps mostly using jsComplete. Paul Hudson’s course on server side Swift was super fun. If you ever have a chance to take one of his workshops, do it! In the meantime, find his books at Hacking With Swift. We built a couple of apps together using Kitura, CouchDB and a very simple interface to interact with the app. Several server side Swift frameworks have arisen since Swift was made open source about a year ago. Kitura by IBM is one of them. It has been benchmarked as faster than the others (see these thorough test results) and has some unofficial support from Apple as it was featured in a talk at WWDC. In the interest of having things come full circle, I added a simple React app to the Polls project for viewing and voting on the created polls. The source for the projects are on GitHub here.
Generally the best part about conferences is being outside your usual bubble and schedule and having the opportunity to talk to people working on a huge variety of things. I had a great time seeing familiar famous faces from the internet as well as meeting new people over post conference drinks & pizza (thanks conf organizers!). I’m impressed with everyone who had the energy to socialize afterwards. Forward has cultivated a great community and I’m looking forward to future events.
