Look back for mDevCamp 2018
INLOOPX at mDevCamp 2018 on June 15th 2018 in Prague Congress Centre.
Twelve of us visited the conference whilst our colleague Věra Žižková helped to organize whole event, and Daniel Novak participated as a speaker. As a speaker, he got the chance to attend the speakers dinner in The Pub (for those who don't know it, you can pull your own beer in there) and got to meet & speak to people from Pinterest, Facebook, jet.com, Buffer…
It was amazing to meet these people and connect with them. For me personally, it was an even better experience than the actual conference itself.
The organizers skipped 2017 in order to make mDevCamp more interesting, funny, and full of new stuff. They make it “the top notch conference” this year.
The organizers also brought in an amazing moderator to introduce the speakers, interact with the crowd, and make the experience even better!
“The top notch” had originally been inspired by the iPhone X notch followed by many Android Phones later.
To enrich the conference, speakers from all over the world were invited, which resulted in talks being only in English. The conference was mainly focused on mobile development, so it was influenced by the latest biggest events like WWDC and Google I/O. Various topics were announced prior to the conference taking place. I should mention architecture, AI and machine learning. There were more, but I consider this list reasonable given the influence of WWDC and Google I/O.
The talks
Depending on what you were expecting from visiting the conference you might be shocked or disappointed. You probably won't hear a breakthrough talk.
I would like to mention an interesting talk by James Thomas about Serverless swift with Apache OpenWhisk. You can use it to deploy simple (or even complex) functions to IBM Cloud and use these functions on demand as a web service. It sounds like a great alternative to AWS Lambda, but we recommend Swift.
Matthew Cheok talked about Building Scalable Abstractions in Swift. He presented the way that they deal with navigation code at Facebook, type safe results, and the abstraction of the Coordinator.
In the end, funny and interesting lightning talks closed the conference off.
Food & fun
mDevCamp 2018 wasn't only about talks and getting in touch with new people. It was also about food & fun!
You can get any variety of lemonades, cups of coffee, freshly prepared tea, and lots of fruit. There was beer at the beginning but, surprisingly, it ran out as first.
In case you were tired of listening to talks you could visit any of the kiosks and play a game. A quiz, phishing challenge, face recognition, or VR game. If you played and did well you got coins for it because there was a whole conference game called “coin exchange”. If you got enough coins you could trade it for prizes. It was fun and the market had been virtually represented by three coins (IDC, ADC, XPC). Find out more here.
I definitely have to mention Jan Ilavsky and his “Beat Saber”. If you have a chance, check it out and play!
mDevCamp 2018 was fun and we enjoyed it a lot. Thanks to all the speakers, organizators, catering and attendees. See you next year. 👋
More pictures from the event can be found on mDevCamp 2018 Facebook.
