We went to FrenchKit 🇫🇷

(Twice!)

During the 2017 conference I saw this Tweet about the FrenchKit event:

@renaudpradenc: “(…)This is more than a conference: this is a party.”

I agree and I would go further by saying that “FrenchKit is a Unique Learning Party”.

This September, I went to the FrenchKit conference with my iOS teammate at iAdvize, Simon Liotier (@SimonLiotier). It was our second participation to this event as our first experience in 2016 was already very rewarding. And as our second participation was just as interesting as the first one, in this article, I’ll share with you a sneak peak of this must attend iOS event.

What is the FrenchKit event? It’s a two-day iOS Developer Conference that takes place in Paris. It’s a brilliant mix of awesome talks and ingenious classrooms proposed by about 26 passionate speakers coming from all over the world.

A must attend iOS event

FrenchKit is mainly focused on the iOS development world but also deals with a lot of other different topics. This year, for example, we attended different presentations such as Table and Collection Views with GPU optimization (by Janina Kutyn), Mocking with Swift (by Bruno Virlet, @bvirlet) but we also watched an introduction about how to create, train and use your model using CoreML (by David Bonnet, @igrandav).

Introduction to CoreML, David Bonnet

I was particularly enthusiastic about a talk given by Pieter Omvlee (@pieteromvlee, the creator of Sketch) who explained to us how he and his team have dealt with Sketch’s huge codebase, optimizing and rewriting one part at a time and tackling problems one by one especially using the awesome and powerful tree-structure model ♥️.

In fact, FrenchKit is more than just a conference for iOS Developers. The conference deals with a lot of different and enriching topics outside the iOS development world. This year, we had the chance to attend a talk about programming language safety and security given by Clément Bourgeois who presented the ADA language which is one of the safest languages currently available and which is mainly used in Aerospace and Defense embedded systems.

Chris Bayley (@Chris__Bailey): after presenting the Kitura framework (IBM’s Server-Side Swift framework) last year, he came back this year to focus on a really interesting concept called Functions as a Service (FaaS) backends using Swift.

Felix Krause (@KrauseFx, the creator of fastlane) was also here and gave some precious advice, tips and tricks on how to scale open source communities based on his experience scaling the famous fastlane tools suite.

Egor Tolstoy (@igrekde) immersed us in a Star Wars pixel arts world to give us precious advice on how to successfully manage a team with a productive and reliable code review process — May the Code Review Be with You. Even if your are not interested in Code Review, I invite you to watch his talk just to check out his awesome slides 😍.

Code review best practices, Egor Tolstoy

Relevant Q&A sessions

After each talk, you always have a quick session of Q&A. One of FrenchKit’s best particularities is that, besides audience questions, two conference organizers are on stage to ask speakers well-prepared and pertinent questions. This particularity allows us to dig deeper into the topic under discussion.

Stimulating Classrooms

As a FrenchKit participant you also get the chance to attend one classroom per day (2 in total). I personally attended two classrooms: the first one was about “Mocking with Swift” and a more novel one called “Leveraging Swift and GLSL shaders to animate real-time music visualisations”. The first classroom was the occasion to use the great Paw macOS app to simulate requests and generate mocks in Swift. The second classroom was the occasion to play with OpenGL shaders to build and animate the Deezer Logo 🙌.

In a few words

TL;DR: The French Kit conference is the occasion to attend great talks given by awesome speakers with a lot of different and interesting subjects, meet great people, eat tasty french food and have a great evening marked by the traditional Apple-fan quizz of the death.

Conferences like FrenchKit are great tech events but there’s more to it. Attending this type of conferences is a great opportunity to meet people, do some “networking” and even create great projects. That’s actually how CocoaHeads Nantes was born: talking with a CocoaHeads Paris organizer decided us to create a meet up dedicated to iOS development in Nantes.

Simon Liotier, iOS Developer @iAdvize

If I have convinced you to attend the next edition of the FrenchKit event or if you still need some other convincing, you can watch this year’s sessions on FrenchKit’s Website.

All this event was remarkably organized by a brilliant team comprised of Xebia and CocoaHeads Paris members.

I would like to thank them again for this awesome edition 😎

See you next year for a new Learning Party 🎉.