Swift Summit SF 2015 Highlights

Eyes Open (to Swift)

Most of the talks didn’t have live coding and were about general topics on Swift—things such as functional programming and dealing with legacy Cocoa APIs. Others drilled down into specific topics such as error handling, tvOS and the wider questions of whether to make a watchOS app.

The breadth of topics at the conference was amazing; I don’t use Cocoapods very often and have never used ReactiveCocoa, which makes hearing about these topics a real eye-opener and lets me step outside my usual comfort zone.

Natasha Murashev – Protocol-Oriented MVVM

Natasha “The Robot” Murashev combined two popular paradigms—protocol-oriented programming and MVVM (model-view-view model)—into the super-initialism POMVVM.

Using the common task of configuring a table view cell, she took us through how to refactor a complex method into smaller pieces with the help of protocols, protocol extensions and view models.

I’ve used protocols and MVVM separately, and putting them together seems like the most natural thing in the world after hearing this talk. The key points here:

• Use protocols to configure your views
• Use protocols extensions for defaults
• Use view models to provide data for the protocols

The combination of protocol extensions with default implementations to override and view models offers a very elegant separation of concerns. I definitely suggest checking out the video for this talk to hear all the details!

Gwendolyn Weston – Why Swift is swift

I really enjoyed Gwendolyn’s lightning talk about one thing that makes Swift swift: vtables!

With people so used to full dynamic dispatch in Objective-C, this talk was a good reminder of how things have changed in the move to Swift. She covered objc_msgSend vs vtables, and gave a very clear explanation of how vtables work with class inheritance and why Swift can be faster when calling methods.

Greg Heo – What I Learned From 55 Swift Standard Library Protocols

OK, I’ll plug my own talk here. ;]

While thinking about how to use protocols, I got the idea to go through all of the protocols in the standard library to see how the Swift team at Apple was using them.

iOS team member Vincent Ngo was kind enough to write the following about my talk:

“Greg split up protocol creation into three categories, the “can do”, “can be”, and “is a” and gave examples of how we can create the different types of protocols. I will definitely be looking at how Apple writes Swift code to learn about their various coding practices. This talk is a good one to watch if you want to learn more about how to use protocols in your projects.”

Two (or more) Is Better Than One

Photo courtesy of Thomas Visser

Photo courtesy of Thomas Visser

Finally, there were two panel sessions at the conference – one on each day. I usually don’t like panels as they can get unfocused and soapbox-like, but the two panels here were great.

Conflict of interest declaration: I moderated one of the panels, which might skew my opinion a bit. ;]

The first panel dealt with Swift going open-source and what that might mean for cross-platform development and the community as a whole. There were predictions, good old speculation, and a discussion on how open-source Swift could affect regular app developers who might never contribute to the compiler or standard library directly.

The second panel was about Swift in production. The panelists had varying amounts of Swift code in production, and it was fascinating to hear about the range of where people were using Swift, how it worked with their build systems, and general tales of the migration away from Objective-C. I’d suggest checking out the video for this session along with Keith’s talk if you’re thinking about making the jump to Swift in production.

Where To Go From Here?

I had a great time at Swift Summit SF 2015 and enjoyed every minute, from the nervousness of giving a talk to meeting attendees to herding together the raywenderlich.com team members in attendance for a group selfie.

RayWenderlich.com team members at Swift Summit! Clockwise from left: Vincent, Alexis, Scott, Eric, Greg.

RayWenderlich.com team members at Swift Summit! Clockwise from left: Vincent, Alexis, Scott, Eric, Greg.

I missed the hands-on interactive nature of a conference like RWDevCon, but I especially enjoyed the single-track format, since this meant I could attend every talk and panel. As a programmer and total nerd, I also liked how the conference is Swift-specific and packed with technical content, in contrast to CocoaConf or 360iDev, where there are also business and design tracks.

If Swift is your thing and you want to dive into a wide variety of technical talks, I highly recommend checking out the videos and attending a future Swift Summit! I think you need at least some Swift experience before attending — the sessions didn’t cover the absolute basics of Swift.

iOS team member Scott Berrevoets had this to say about the overall experience:

Between watching all of the Swift Summit London videos and attending in San Francisco, I’m more excited than ever about coding in Swift and participating in the developer community.

Were you at Swift Summit too, or do you have any questions about the conference? Join the discussion in the forum comments below!