vpTech review on DotSwift 2020
DotSwift is a DotConference focused around Apple’s programming language Swift. The conference took place in an atypical location for a conference, the Théatre de Paris. It was the first FowSift edition that last a full day. The detailed schedulle wasn’t comunicated in advance, only the speaker’s names were known.
The topics of the talks were revealed with every new speaker coming on the stage.
But before starting the talks, we were asked to greet and meet our neighbors, a DotConference tradition borrrowed to Ted conferences.
Two types of talks were presented: 18 minutes talks and lightning talks of 4 minutes.
As for the topics, SwiftUI was the trendiest of the day. Unfortunately, SwiftUI is not yet production ready, and i tprobably won’t be this year. But we can’t deny it’s an exciting new solution provided by Apple.
In my opinion, too much talks were dedicated to SwiftUI, but the variery of the other talks compensate for that. among them: Architectuire, UITest Automation, Network Architecture, Backend for Frontend, Asynchronous code, Combine, Property Wrappers and finally Cryptography.
Here is a quick summary of the most memorable ones:
- BFF’s by Tim Condon
Microservice architecture for the backend has multiple advantages such as: versatility scalability, fast and continuous improvement of each functionality, simpler mainenance and modularity.
Unfortunately, for mobile apps, microservices can cause some headaches.
Hacing to make multiples network calls, over multiple APIs and agregate those data just to populate a creen can be really reagious and affect the swiftness of the app.
Tim Condon, a server-slide Swift enthusiast (Server-side Swift co-team lead author at raywenderlich.com), proposes to solve this issue by using a Swift Backend for Frontend (BFF). His claim being to make a custom-tailored BFF for each app, and to give ownership of it to be in team in charge of the app.
He demonstrates how a BFF can simplify your networking code, reduce context switching and the ability to share code between the BFF and the app.
- Protyping custom UI with SwiftUI by Tobias Due Munck
Tobias Due Munck introduced us to fast prototyping with the help of SwiftUI. His talks needs to be seen, so I strongly recommend you to watch it and enjoy it.
Using only SwiftUI, he built UI protype that visualizes the sound level on the room, as well as an historic of the sound level recorded. He demonstrated the power and ease of use of SwiftUI to develop custom UI with the already available functions.
- Property Wrappers by Erica Sadun
Erica Sadun was the most captivating speaker of the day. She’s very active in the Swift Evolution community. She has more Swift Language proposal outright rejected than any other person in the community, which makes her proud, even if she wished some of them would have been accepted.
Swift 5.2 will introduce the Property Wrappers feature. A property wrapper is an elegant way to attach custom behaviors and logic to properties themselves.
Once again, it’s a talk that needs to be watched. Her story telling skills are amazing and her passion about clean code is inspiring.
- SwiftCrypto by Cory Beinfield
Last but no least, Cory Benfield, a Software Engineer at Apple honored us by announcing the brand new open-source project for Swift developed by Apple.
Swift Crypto allows us to use CryptoKit’s APIs on all platforms that Swift supports.
- To conclude…
At the end of the day, I can say that the conference was a success. No less than 12 interesting talks were given. Making only one talk at the time allowed us to follow every topic which is uncommon in this kind of event.
I strongly recommend it for diversity of the talks and their various level of technicity. If you are interested in watching those talks, you can find them here.
