Sep 23, 2022
GoodDevs at NSSpain 2022
Diary of an unconventional work week
GoodDevs are at NSSpain 2022 September 2022! After more than 2 years without on-site conferences, our engineering team decided to join one of the biggest iOS conferences in Europe, NSSpain X — we couldn’t say no to the chance to participate with one speaker and also sponsor NSSpain, a great event full of awesome speakers and top iOS devs.
Our team got to Logroño on Wednesday night. Nine developers, five from the iOS team and four from the cross-platform team, got ready to plan and review all the talks and speakers participating at the event the next day. After a thorough review, we decided there were many talks we were excited to hear, including “Composable Architecture at Scale” by Krzysztof Zablocki, “Improving the iOS development process guided by technical metrics” by Jessica Hernández and obviously, “Swift WebAssembly + GoodNotes, a cross-platform story!” by myself!
The first day started and we couldn’t be happier. We arrived together, ready to enjoy the talks with the iOS community. “Improving the iOS development process guided by technical metrics” was one of our favorite talks! Jessica explained how to use tools to measure, improve and act accordingly to improve development workflows guided by metrics.
On the afternoon of the first day, Pedro (the author of this post btw) gave a talk explaining our experience and technical details on how we’re developing GoodNotes for other platforms like Windows, Android, or web browsers reusing the iOS codebase. Pedro’s talk covered in detail how we crafted our cross-platform project using WebAssembly + Swift and explained some interesting technical challenges and solutions.
When the day was over, we gathered together again and reviewed the next day’s talks. Again talks like “How to choose the right branching strategy for your team (and why it matters!)” by Isabel Barrera, and “Rewriting SoundCloud in SwiftUI” by Matias Villaverde and Rens Breur got our attention.
As expected, Isabel’s talk was fantastic — covering different branching strategies for version control systems was an inspiration for us as a team because it made us think twice about our use of Git as VCS in our mono repository. We also had the chance to speak to her in person during the breaks about the event, Logroño, and our projects!
On Friday afternoon, the event ended, and it was time to head home. We had an awesome time at NSSpain! Our team works remotely and having the chance to see each other on-site in events like this is something we love.
Hear what the team has got to say:
“The conference went well, and we even randomly chatted with several potential candidates! And it was satisfying seeing people walking around with GoodNotes tote bags each day! ”
— Miguel Ángel Díaz, Senior iOS Engineer
“Pedro’s talk was one of the most technical meetings in the whole conference. Also, he was the only one using swift outside of the iOS/macOS environments.
It felt welcoming to attend this kind of event with the GoodNotes teams; considering that most of us are working remotely, it is a great opportunity to share time with your workmates, meet each other, and obviously have fun together.”
— Francisco Javier Trujillo Mata, Senior iOS Engineer
“Going back to an in-person event has been a great experience. I was able to meet many people from my team for the first time, see Pedro’s talk, and speak with many known and unknown faces from the community. Pretty interesting talks, people, and lots of fun!”
— Pablo Carcelén, Senior iOS Engineer
We had a wonderful experience at NSSpain. The talks were great. It was very interesting to see how other companies solve similar problems that we’re facing and learn about new topics from some great presenters. But if there’s something that makes NSSpain particularly unique, it is the social aspect. Perhaps motivated by the very first in-person NSSpain after 3 years, the atmosphere was perfect. Everyone was super approachable, and we had some fantastic talks with speakers and other attendees during breaks and social events planned by the organisers. It was also a great opportunity to meet in-person some team members that many of us didn’t have a chance to meet yet.
Our colleague Pedro showed once again his excellent presentation skills. In 45 minutes he managed to give a great overview of the past, present and future of Cross-Platform, give credit to the team, promote GoodNotes and share that we’re hiring. Nice work, buddy!
— Juanjo Ramos Rodríguez, Engineering Manager
Did you go to the NSSpain this year and if yes, how did you find it? Leave a comment below! Our team loved it and we will be back next year and will try to be on the stage again - see you there?
This article was written by:
Pedro Gómez is a Senior Software Engineer focused on new technologies, open-source, clean code, and testing. He is now working as a Senior Software Engineer in the cross-platform team at GoodNotes.
