Swift Summit conference in San Francisco 2017

Swift Summit Conference 2017 was held at the Palace Of Fine Arts, San Francisco, which is one of ten palaces at the heart of the Panama-Pacific Exhibition. At the conference, Swift developers from around the world shared new knowledge, tools and ideas on iOS platform and Swift language.

Image 1. I was there, at the Swift Summit conference 2017

The conference hosted more than 20 technical sessions and developer labs. Especially, there was an exhibitor hall with top tech companies like Facebook, IBM, Lyft, Capital One, etc. There, I met other developers, talked about new technologies and received swags from sponsors.

Image 2. My bag (And another one of my friend's) was full of swags from the conference :)).

Ten days to enjoy the US, two days to enjoy the conference

As it had been the first time I go to San Francisco, I was not comfortable with the weather there. I remember that in the first morning day I went to the Palace of Fine Arts, the weather was 13c degree at that time. I was freezing to death!
When I first entered the main hall, I felt better because of the warm light. The organizers prepared a lot of food and fruits on a table in the center of the hall. My friends and I went around to visit tech companies, tried using their new technologies, and received their swags.
The size of the conference was not as I expected. It was quite small, about one hundred people, I guess. But the organizers and the speakers prepared contents very well. Below are some key sessions that I attribute the best during two conference days.

Asynchronous programming

Asynchronous methods, (Async for short), are the methods that not immediately returning results like most method, the async methods take some time to produce results.
Before attending this session, I often use callback to deal with asynchronous methods like scanning bluetooth devices or retrieving some resources from the internet. In fact, callback is a bad programming technique. Callback will make our code hard to read, hard to debug and take much more time to maintain later. In the end, our code will turn into something that we call the callback hell.
In this session, the speaker introduced a framework that helps us to simplify asynchronous programming, PromiseKit. It is easy to learn, easy to use and result in clearer, more readable code.
For more details about this session, please refer to another one of my posts: Asynchronous Programming in Swift

Buglife

BugLife is an open framework help our users to submit a bug report from their phone, and it immediately shows up in our issue dashboard. The best benefits that I found when I use BugLife are it is free and is easy to integrate to our apps without breaking a sweat.
For more details about how to use this framework, please refer to another one of my posts: BugLife in real life

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a library help us to track user behaviors and other events that occur on our apps. Many technology companies use Mixpanel to analyze their data to get to know their users deeper. From the results, they can make decisions to improve their app to please users.

Image 3. Developers were attending a developer Lab.

Swift on the Server: State of the Union

This session described the current state of Swift on the server, and make some predictions about what the next year will hold. Unfortunately, I fell asleep in this session so I dont catch many ideas from the speaker.
For more details about how to use this framework, please refer to another one of my posts: Swift on the server side

iOS Architectures in Context

Why we have to care about choosing an architecture?
Nowadays, we have so many software architectures to choose, if we do not choose a fit architecture for our apps, one day we will find ourselves in being unable to find and fix any issues inside our apps. During this session, the speaker discussed on some iOS architectures like MVC, MVP, MVVM, VIPER, etc. With many years of experience working on software architectures, he evaluated on both upside and downside one by one.
For me, this session was quite difficult to grab all ideas of the speaker since I don’t have many experiences in designing software architectures. After that, I had to spend more time to read other documents and technical blogs to get understand what he said.

Image 4. The scene around the conference

After all …

Late on the second day, we had a Halloween party in the hall of the palace. This is my first time attending a technology conference in a technology-led country, the US. After two days attending the conference, I have updated some new technologies and also applied some technologies to projects at my company. Truly to say, there are some sessions that are a little boring and only introductory. Also the jet lag made me feel tired so I did not fully concentrate on some sessions. That’s a regret.
In the end, this is still the best trip ever!

Image 5. An unforgetable trip