AltConf 2015 Highlights

Update August 25, 2015: Added links to the actual talks – special thanks to Arwa Jumkawala for providing the links!

Every year, thousands of developers descend upon the Bay Area for WWDC, but there is another draw too — AltConf. Since you need luck on your side to score a ticket to WWDC, AltConf has become a popular alternative gathering.

AltConf offers something for those who couldn’t get in to WWDC, or just wanted an event that is a bit less official. It’s also a great opportunity hear from some of the best and brightest from the iOS community. Best of all, AltConf is free!

This year, AltConf took place at AMC Metreon, just on the other side of street from Moscone West. It used three theatres: two were dedicated to talks and the third was for televising talks from different conferences, including RWDevCon!

According to the organizers, about 1,000 people attended, many of whom wore WWDC badges while walking around and listening to talks. But the coolest thing was that even with so many attendees, you could always find a seat. :]

Around 30 members of the raywenderlich.com team, including me, attended AltConf this year, and we all had a blast.

In this article, I’ll share my take about how the conference went, along with recaps of the raywenderlich.com team’s favorite talks. Let’s dive in!

“I still think it is cooler to hang around with indie devs and meet everyone from the community. That is the reason why I choose AltConf and didn’t even participate in the Apple’s lottery.” – Marin Todorov

Apple Streaming

This year’s conference started with an unfortunate dose of controversy: Apple decided to prevent any streaming of WWDC content. AltConf quickly posted a press release to explain the situation.

Almost immediately, discontentment began to manifest around the web, as you can see in this article from Mac Rumors. One day later Apple rolled back and allowed the Keynote and State of the Union to be streamed. The community responded positively!

How myself and the raywenderlich.com team feel about AltConf!

How myself and the raywenderlich.com team feel about AltConf!

Design is Not for Designers, by Joe Cieplinski

This one was quite a nice surprise! Joe demonstrated why designers should design for the average user, and not to impress their friends and competition. He asserted that design should be straightforward and not full of gimmicks.

Joe showed some examples of good, clean interfaces and compared them with the kinds of designer-driven designs that serve up confusion and frustration to users. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Mac Pro website). Among the team here, this talk was one of the favorites.

“Joe is a designer who learned to code, which is nice since I’m a developer too, and he can “talk design” to us nerds.” – Greg Heo

Objective-C++: What could possibly go wrong? by Peter Steinberger

While everyone is hopping aboard the Swift train, Peter presented on how he leverages C++ 11 in his company. He shared some interesting examples of how C++ has progressed in terms of syntax and features from one version to another. Also, he showed some code snippets from his own PSPDFKit and explained how it’s helped him.

This talk will definitely appeal if you are curious on how you can use C++ in your own apps.

Overloading Comparison, by Ray Wenderlich

Just two days before this talk, I was talking about how the imposter syndrome affects some of us (me included!) in our industry, in one way or another.

As Ray explained, every single one of us has our own strengths and weakness, more than that, we all have different goals in life. So, it becomes impossible to compare people with different ambitions. We should focus on what’s important: improving ourselves and never stopping learning.

By the way, did you know that Ray once won a beach beauty contest? :]

250 Days Shipping with Swift and VIPER, by Brice Pollock

The first time I saw Viper was a while ago in an objc.io issue.

My feelings, even after attending this talk, remain the same. It looks interesting, but the architecture’s complexity means the burden shifts to the amount of classes and different components/entities you have. However, I’m intrigued enough that I will have to find time to try it myself so that I have a better understanding of what it entails.

Despite my own personal take on the subject, Brice’s talk was presented very well.

Choose Your Character, by Brianna Wu

The Gamergate controversy affected nearly everyone who develops games, either directly or indirectly. Brianna started her talk by explaining how it began and expanded on how deeply it affected dozens of women in the gaming industry.

Although I had read some bits about the subject, I was totally oblivious to how deeply these women were attacked — and still are on a daily basis.

Sadly, Brianna only had 30 minutes for her talk, so she had to rush it, though I don’t think anyone in the audience would have minded listening her full testimony.

A Tale of Two Swifts, by Ben

You might know Ben by his online alter ego: AirSpeed Velocity.

This talk was changed at the last minute due to the release of Swift 2.0. Ben talked about how much you can achieve with abstraction and simpler components, and engineer powerful but less complex systems by using some of the latest features in Swift.

As you might expect from Ben, he presented some great material. By the way, if you have an opportunity to see one of his talks live, you should definitely go for it. Besides being a great speaker, Ben is a really nice person to talk with!