dotSwift 2018
A number of the Hotels.com iOS Engineers spent the day at the dotSwift 2018 conference in Paris. Although the name implies the focus of the conference is the Swift programming language — a few of the talks diverged into other aspects of the iOS platform and even our old friend Objective-C came up a couple of times.
The headline speaker was Ben Cohen; an Engineer from Apple working in the Swift Core Team. He gave a good introduction to the Swift standard library; what its purpose is; and how anybody can help the language move forward since it was open-sourced a few years ago.
Our own Sally Shepard gave a talk about the importance of accessibility. Being an Accessibility Evangelist herself and having been affected by visual accessibility issues, she showed how broad the issues and solutions to accessibility problems can be, and how we can and should make applications and experiences available to everybody.
Another speaker who caught my attention was Graham Lee; a Software Architect at Wealth Wizards. He showed that both Object-Oriented and Function programming are not necessarily opposite ends of the language spectrum. He cleverly used set theory to show that functional aspects and object-oriented aspects, such as those found in Objective-C, can essentially be equivalent. I have over-simplified, but I encourage you to watch his talk to hear the full message.
As well as many other professional speakers, there were a number of lightning-talks provided by members of the Swift community. These were fast-paced, short messages of useful tips and approaches.
Overall, it was a great day out — being able to meet other Swift Engineers was the most valuable part of attending dotSwift for me. It also validated some of the approaches that we’ve taken in the Hotels.com iOS team, and makes me proud to be a member of it.
Videos will be posted by the organisers soon — so keep an eye on https://dotswift.io for those.
