Siriously Susan
Glowforge
Intrepid
Purple Evolution
Adept Mobile
Element55
Chewy
Raizlabs, a Rightpoint company
Apperto
Trello
RayWenderlich.com
Kidfund
Detroit Labs
Netcetera
Verily
IBM
Pivotal Labs
The Washington Post
Rue La La
Slalom
WayFair
Intrepid
Lyft
Topology Eyewear
Rue La La
Okay, it turns out there is an actual human being behind the Siri voice: Susan Bennett, singer, voice actor, and the original voice of Siri on the iPhone 4S and beyond. In her presentation, Susan will give you a peek behind the scenes of the Siri recordings, how they were done, and how the scripts should probably become part of the Smithsonian collection! Susan also talks about the voiceover business, which is how she became the voice of Siri in the first place; she does a lot of different character voices and describes how technology dramatically changed the face of voice recording over the last couple of decades. Finally, Susan discusses the very human emotional challenge of being the voice of Siri, and becoming “Accidentally Famous” as well. Susan’s presentation takes a look at technology from an artist’s point of view…from a human point of view, so relax, bring your lunch and your sense of humor!
Susan Bennett Voice of Siri, Siriously Susan
You may not know Susan Bennett, but you definitely know her voice! Susan is a voice actor and singer whose voice has appeared on hundreds of radio and TV commercials for such clients as McDonald’s, Macy’s, Goodyear, Papa John’s, Fisher Price, and more. She is the voice of Delta Airlines gates worldwide, as well as hundreds of GPS and phone systems, but you probably know her best as the original voice of Siri.
Susan has appeared on nationally televised programs The Mariah Carey Merriest Christmas Special, The Queen Latifah Show, CNN, Showbiz Tonight, The Jack & Triumph Show, the new To Tell the Truth, and she read the Top Ten list for David Letterman!
Susan was born in Burlington, Vermont, and spent her youth in New England. She was always interested in music and acting, which she pursued during her four years at Brown University, singing in theater productions, and in the jazz band, “Conglomerate.” Susan was the leader of singing group, The Chattertocks, as well. After graduation, she married NHL hockey player, Curt Bennett, and moved to Atlanta, Georgia, where Curt played for The Atlanta Flames, and Susan began her voiceover and singing career. Susan toured with Burt Bacharach as a backup singer, and later toured and traveled the world with Roy Orbison, also singing backup vocals, with a featured duet. She sang jingles as well for such clients as Coca Cola, Georgia Power, Kroger, and Krystal restaurants. It was after a jingle session that Susan was asked to voice a commercial when the voice talent didn’t show up. She discovered that voiceover was something she did well and enjoyed, so she took voice coaching, got an agent, and started on a career that is still going strong!
Susan continues to live and work in Atlanta, Georgia, along with second husband guitarist and audio engineer, Rick Hinkle, of Audiocam Music. Susan and Rick had a private event band called “Interactive!” for more than two decades, and they still continue to work together in their 60’s and 70’s rock and soul band, “Boomers Gone Wild!”
Susan has one child, son Cameron Schuyler Bennett, who lives in Los Angeles. He is a photographer, and also works with social media company, Fanbase.”
A lot of developers are quick to say that designers should learn to develop. To me, being able to design is an important skill to have as a developer. We all know that there is a significant divide when it comes to designers and developers. This split limits us to be better developers because sometimes we do not want to see the other side of things. Sometimes we as developers do not understand the designer’s point of view. Developers and designers have different specialties that we can leverage from each other.
In this talk, I will discuss the different specialties we can take advantage of from both sides. Additionally, I will cover why you should start picking your designer’s brain today. Finally, I will discuss how to get started and what tools designers are using today for doing wireframes to iOS app designs.
Craig Clayton Senior iOS Engineer, Adept Mobile
Craig Clayton is a Sr. iOS Engineer at Adept Mobile, which specializes in building mobile experiences primarily for NBA & NFL teams. Craig also volunteers as the organizer of the Suncoast iOS meetup group in the Tampa/St. Petersburg area, and prepares presentations and hands-on talks for the community. On top of all that, Craig is also the owner of Cocoa Academy, which specializes in iOS video courses.
For a topic so fundamental to the practice of software engineering, designing test suites and measuring their efficacy remains difficult. For example, how does one determine the origin of a test failure in the codebase, or know if they’re designing testable components? Beyond that, what are common indicators of an over-tested codebase? Questions like these become more challenging given particular domains and applications, and usually require non-obvious testing strategies.
To help you answer these questions, this presentation will go through the development process of a thoroughly tested audio synthesizer and demonstrate patterns and methodologies that can help you build a better test suite. By the end of the presentation, you’ll have developed a toolkit for building an effective, easy-to-use, and understandable test suite.
Sean Olszewski Software Engineer & Consultant, Pivotal Labs
Currently a software engineer at Pivotal Labs, Sean Olszewski focuses on practicing test driven development and the design of effective test suites in his day-to-day work. Previously, he has worked on code bases for intelligent hydroponic gardens, connected vehicles, and audio synthesizers. When he’s not working on projects for clients, he can be found at meet ups in the Boston area, or organizing the two meet ups he runs: Learn Swift Boston, and XP Boston. Feel free to ask Sean any testing or audio questions you might have!
From the onset, Swift was designed to take over the world — or at least the programming world. So it’s no surprise that the development community is excited to bring it’s power to as many platforms as possible. Our eager community was given Swift on Apple platforms, but no sooner than it was open sourced did we get the power to write Swift on Linux (and some people have even figured out how to run it on Android)! In this workshop, we’re going to focus on the first two. Together we’ll build the foundations of a restaurant reservation service. We’ll start by making a server, written in Swift, for our app to interact with. Once we have the server and the app in place, we’ll build a watchOS app so you can use our service without having to dig out your phone!
Matt Dias Senior iOS Engineer, Chewy
Matt Dias is a Senior iOS Engineer at Chewy. His background extends from building iOS apps, using Objective-C and Swift, to building the backends they are fed data from. Over the past year, Matt has been growing the Boston Swift community by co-organizing Learn Swift Boston, where he and many others help developers of all skill levels learn to build software using Swift.
iOS technologies are rapidly evolving with every WWDC announcement, and it is increasingly challenging for iOS developers to keep up with the features, innovations, and best practices. It is especially difficult for those preparing for job interviews to navigate the breadth of information available and focus on the most critical topics and skills. Whether you’re a beginner developer seeking that dream job or a seasoned veteran who is ready for a better one — this talk will prepare you to succeed in your next technical iOS interview.
This presentation will give an overview of the most important topics and skills covered in a technical iOS interview including
At the end of this session, the audience will be fully ready to tackle their next iOS interview and know where to go to improve their skills and knowledge in specific topics.
Alex Bush Software Consultant, entrepreneur, book author, and podcaster
Alex is a seasoned iOS consultant who’s been building iOS apps, top to bottom, client to server, over the last 7 years. Alex is an author of The iOS Interview Guide and a co-host at Inside iOS Dev podcast. Currently he’s focusing on his consulting work and on leveling up iOS developers by teaching them architecture and design patterns best practices.
Understanding Auto Layout is your best chance to write UI code you can be proud of. Its power often underestimated, its features easily misused, I find it overall less appreciated than it could be, if more widely understood.
This talk is aiming to show how relying heavily on Auto Layout makes you move faster and be more confident writing UI code. Working with the safe area, showing off custom UILayoutGuides and making use of the controversal UIStackViews, we will walk through the simple code of a more complex interface together.
Agnes Vasarhelyi iOS Developer, Topology Eyewear
Agnes is a Hungarian living in San Francisco, hard at work bringing the high tech revolution to the fashion industry at Topology Eyewear. Meetup and conference organizer in her previous life in Budapest, now busy building premium user experiences on iOS, learning about graphics programming, and hiking the mountains of California in the meantime.
The evolution of user interfaces in mobile apps continues with the most natural way of expressing the user’s wishes - their voice. Understanding what the users say is not an easy task.
In this talk, you will learn about several speech analysis approaches that help you in this challenging task, from Apple’s brand new Core ML and SiriKit, to Google’s Dialogflow and Facebook’s Wit.ai, along with some well known Natural Language Processing algorithms like the TF-IDF.
Martin Mitrevski Technical Leader, Netcetera
Martin works as a technical lead at Netcetera, developing apps in several areas, such as transport, indoor navigation, virtual reality, entertainment and publishing. He is the author of the book “Developing Conversational Interfaces for iOS”. Martin shares his knowledge on his blog martinmitrevski.com and as a conference speaker.
My talk will tell our 3 year story as a 2 person independent developer team making the two popular photo and video editing apps Typorama and Videorama, reaching 6M downloads worldwide, generating 1M+ annual revenue on the App Store. I’ll be talking about both the technical and the business tactics and strategies we used to drive downloads and create products loved and used by millions.
Learning and using the latest programming technologies and trends is cool, but if you combine that with a business and marketing know-how, developers have a huge potential in their hands to create super profitable micro businesses just on their own. Making a living off the App Store is getting harder each day, and I’ll help the audience learn how to hack their way to success.
Sarp Erdag Founder & Lead Developer, Apperto
Sarp is an independent iOS developer, designer and entrepreneur. He co-founded the two popular apps, Typorama and Videorama, which got more than 6M downloads worldwide, reaching $1M annual revenue. His work has been featured by Apple, TechCrunch, ProductHunt, Entrepreneur Magazine, Popular Science and many other online and printed news sources. Sarp is an expert in building self-funded, bootstrapped app businesses, and passionate about sharing his knowledge and experiences throughout his journey.
Design patterns are reusable solutions to common development problems. They aren’t project specific, so you can use them in countless apps. But which design pattern should you use for a particular problem? How do you know if one is better suited than another? If you wrestle with these questions in your own apps, you’re in luck! This is exactly what you’ll learn in this workshop. You’ll first review a few common and niche design patterns. Specifically, you’ll go over design patterns that solve similar problems but in different ways. Along the way, you’ll learn a thing or two about design patterns, but most importantly, you’ll learn a strategy for picking one pattern over another. This will be a hands-on workshop, so make sure you bring your laptop with you!
Joshua Greene Author and Technical Editor, RayWenderlich.com
Joshua Greene is a long-time author and technical editor for RayWenderlich.com. He is the lead author of Design Patterns by Tutorials and co-author of tvOS Apprentice. Joshua is very passionate about writing maintainable code, and he’s an advocate for design patterns and test driven development.
This will be a collaborative experience - come help David pick some objects to train a CoreML model on stage! We’ll use an iPhone camera to take some photos, then we’ll use IBM Watson to train the model. After that, with (literally) one line of code, we’ll deploy the model into an iOS framework called Lumina to test the model on stage with all of the different objects!
David Okun Developer Advocate, IBM
David Okun is a mobile software developer turned developer advocate for IBM in Austin, Texas. David has been primarily focused on iOS mobile software, but is also interested in web technology such as Node.js. He’s shared over 35 projects with the community on GitHub. David’s favorite thing to do is to teach, and he loves an opportunity to clearly explain how something works, and walk someone through it.
Part of making an iOS app an enjoyable experience involves some magic… err illusion. One of those illusions is that if a user leaves your app and it goes to the background, when they return everything will be exactly as they left it. The reality is that, with few exceptions, your app will actually be suspended, then deallocated by the operating system. Without a little trickery, when users come back to your app they’ll be greeted with a launch screen and have to start their navigation experience from scratch. Join me as we talk about some of the tricks you can use to ensure that when users come back to your app everything appears as if they never left.
Ish Shabazz iOS Developer
Ish has been an independent iOS App Developer since 2010. He works full time as a network engineer and spends practically every moment outside of that developing apps or working on something app-related. His apps have been featured by Apple, Starbucks, App Advice, iMore, and Daring Fireball. Ish’s story was featured in the documentary App: The Human Story. He is currently working on Capsicum, a daily planner and notebook.
Writing Swift, I have a strong preference for immutable objects, why? Because immutability leads to simplicity and clarity since implicit in an object’s creation, is a guarantee that it will never change.
It is remarkable how much this single, seemingly, simple fact, can make programs easier to verify, and reason about.
But, in object-oriented environments, blindly defaulting to immutable objects can lead to unintended consequences.
Jon-Tait Beason iOS Engineer, Glowforge
Jon-Tait Beason is a iOS software engineer at Glowforge, maker of a 3D Laser Printer. He has a background in education and enjoys teaching and learning. To that end, he spends a lot of time hanging out in iOS communities where he learns from others and helps engineers starting out.
Security is hard. It’s filled with complex math and obscure system details, but that isn’t why it’s hard. Security is hard because it requires a different way of thinking. It’s about what systems really do rather than what they’re supposed to do. It’s about making things fail rather than succeed. It’s about controls and response more often than code and algorithms. And at its best it’s invisible and thankless. You never know all the bad things that didn’t happen. Security is critical. In our hyper-connected systems filled with sensitive information, we need developers who understand how to think about security and how to implement secure systems. Security requires expertise, but it can’t just be left to experts. It has to be a part of every stage of development. No one wants to be the next company listed under an embarrassing headline.
Rob Napier
Rob is co-author of iOS Programming Pushing the Limits, and maintainer of the RNCryptor encryption format. Before coming to Cocoa, he made his living sneaking into Chinese facilities in broad daylight. Today, he shapes music over Bluetooth for Logitech, explores old ideas in new languages, and tries to figure out how all of this applies to Swift.
Let’s be honest here: forms are probably not the shining star of your app. But they’re one of the first things a user sees, and can huge stumbling blocks to user trust if you don’t give them some thought.
So take your forms from 😡 to 😍! We’ll cover UI basics, implementation details, and UX strategies for building the best forms on the App Store, all with real-world details you can take right back to your desk and start using.
After this, your users might even wish for more forms.
The beginning will be a discussion on the struggle/arguments that iOS developers have over which way is better for creating UIs: Storyboards or Programmatic.
Then, I’ll present a middle ground that is the main topic: building UIs in Playgrounds. This is a technique that the Kickstarter team uses in their app (which is open source), and I use that as a starting point, but I have developed practices around it to make it more accessible.
We’ll talk about some of the benefits you get that neither Storyboards or traditional programmatic UI have (access to app behavior, animations, TDD style, very fast edit/run cycles for prototyping)
There will be some live-coding to give the feel of what it’s like to do this in the context of an app (a playground that is part of a larger app project).
Code signing ensures that all mobile apps come from known, trusted sources and haven’t been tampered with while in transit to a user’s device. Though an integral part of keeping the iOS ecosystem secure, for many developers Apple’s code signing methodology remains somewhat cryptic.
We’ll begin by defining code signing at a fundamental level-covering the basics of hashing and public-key cryptography-in order to gain a clear understanding of code signing before diving into Apple’s implementation on iOS. Unlike other mobile platforms, code signing on iOS involves additional layers of security; we’ll describe the functionality of provisioning profiles, certificates and keychains. We’ll dive into why Apple’s code signing is mandatory, and how it extends the concept of the chain-of-trust from the operating system to the apps, and prevents third parties from loading any potentially harmful code.
Pat Butkiewicz
Pat Butkiewicz is an iOS developer turned DevOps engineer that has been building mobile apps, and the infrastructure to support them for 6 years at Intrepid Pursuits in Cambridge, MA. Daily responsibilities include mentoring junior developers, managing the mobile continuous integration/deployment pipeline, and working with clients on various cloud platforms. Most importantly I’m responsible for maintaining our continuous integration environment as well as improving on existing mobile development processes through automation. Together with a small team, we build tools and maintain a small fleet of Jenkins servers for 75+ mobile and web developers.
Accessibility is an often ignored part of iOS development, partly because much of it is “baked in” to the OS and “just works” most of the time. However, building custom UI elements and interactions can lead to a breakdown of accessibility. In this talk, we’ll explore VoiceOver, the screen reader that allow many disabled users to interact with your app. We’ll walk through a non-accessible app and optimize it for VoiceOver users. Finally, we’ll go over common pitfalls and solutions to keep in mind when designing and building accessible experiences.
Hung Truong
Hung is an iOS Engineer at Lyft where he converts free snacks and coffee into lots of Swift code that moves cars and people around. He has been hacking on iOS since before the original iPhone OS 2.1 SDK was released in 2008. His hobbies include brewing cold brew coffee, photography and being the social media manager and growth hacker for his corgi, Sodapop.
As developers we often take the text rendering system for granted. As a fundamental part of both iOS and macOS we often don’t give it a second thought. It’s just there. This session will explore: the transition from 7 segment LED text to the beautiful fonts we use today, translate the vocabulary designers use when describing text layout, and conclude by examining TextKit and how to get direct access to font paths.
A better understanding of
Ayal Spitz
Ayal Spitz has 25+ years’ experience in mobile computing, distributed software, emerging technologies, and technology fusion. Over the course of his career he has focused on solving problems in new and unique ways. As a senior principal software engineer at Intrepid Pursuits he is focused on raising the level of engineering craftsmanship and code quality. Prior to working at Intrepid, Ayal worked for government, military, and commercial clients bringing mobile computing to bear on their problem set.
As a developer who’s been bitten time and time again by Daylight Saving Time and related bugs, by now you’ve mastered the art of wrangling dates and times in Swift. Or have you? This talk will cover some of the more inscrutable topics of dates and times: how many seconds are there in a particular year? How do I get a notification to fire at exactly 9:00 AM on the user’s phone? What if my user isn’t using the Gregorian calendar and I want to draw a calendar? In this talk, we’ll cover all this and more, drawing on the Swift standard library and Apple’s system SDKs to manipulate the very fabric of time itself… or at least it’ll feel that way by the time we’re done.
This session covers more advanced date and time code. An attendee will be able to reliably schedule notifications in the user’s local time, find dates in the future, and even work with calendars with different numbers of months, days in the week, and more!
Jeff Kelley
Jeff Kelley is a developer at Detroit Labs, where he builds apps in Swift but still has a soft spot for Objective-C. Author of Developing Apps for Apple Watch and Learn Cocoa Touch for iOS, he’s been working with iOS since its infancy in 2008. Jeff is passionate about building usable apps, the open-source community around Apple platforms, and will talk your ear off about electric cars and clean energy. Jeff loves raising his two kids and two dogs, Detroit, and organizing the Motor City CocoaHeads group.
SwiftSyntax is the Swift project’s library for working with Swift source code. In this workshop, you can learn how to rapidly prototype linting and formatting tools from the library’s author. No prior knowledge of SwiftSyntax is required, but a good grasp of Swift itself will be necessary. Note that SwiftSyntax is only available in developer snapshots of the Swift toolchain; please install the latest Trunk development (master) toolchain snapshot before the workshop from https://swift.org/downloads.
Do you find yourself creating messy code in order to transform Swift optionals? Do you wish you harnessed the functional power of Swift more? This talk is for you! Come learn about creating elegant code with map, flatMap, filter, and reduce through some cupcake magic. Let’s make your code more Swifty!
map, flatMapcompactMap, filter, and reduceNeem Serra
Neem Serra is a mobile developer at Slalom in St. Louis. She teaches and mentors at a variety of non-profit organizations such as Software Carpentry. As the lead of the Google Women Techmakers group in St. Louis, she started the St. Louis Techies Project to highlight the diversity of technical people in St. Louis. Neem loves to bake, read comics, and host craft nights.
In this hands on session you will build a simple iOS app using Firebase Cloud Firestore. We will include topics like getting setup with Firebase, storing data, and advanced queries.
Todd Burner
Todd Burner is a Developer Advocate on the Firebase team. He previously worked on other teams in Google Cloud Platform, at Twitter, and a few mobile-first startups. He spends his time helping developers get up and running with open source and Google projects on GitHub and Stack Overflow, as well as meeting developers in person across the world.
Ever wonder why a website is recommending that hot pink dress shirt to you? What happens when you’re browsing and tap into a product you like? It’s all part of the fine tuned machine which is data science. This talk will detail how Rue La La has used data science to drive revenue, enhance personalized shopping and provide an engaging mobile app experience. We hope that by the end of this talk all attendees will have an understanding of big data, machine learning and the impact it is having on eCommerce at large.
Glen Yi
Glen Yi is the lead iOS engineer at Rue La La. He graduated in Computer Engineering from the University of Toronto, some lifetime ago, and has been doing iOS development since 2012. Likes the Toronto Blue Jays, Maple Leafs except when they’re losing game 7s, and the Toronto Raptors when they’re not getting swept.
Ever wonder why a website is recommending that hot pink dress shirt to you? What happens when you’re browsing and tap into a product you like? It’s all part of the fine tuned machine which is data science. This talk will detail how Rue La La has used data science to drive revenue, enhance personalized shopping and provide an engaging mobile app experience. We hope that by the end of this talk all attendees will have an understanding of big data, machine learning and the impact it is having on eCommerce at large.
Mehrnoosh Sameki
Mehrnoosh Sameki is a data scientist at Rue La La. She received her PhD in computer science from Boston University. Following the completion of her degree in August 2017, she moved to her current role, which combines her passion for data science, machine learning and fashion! She is interested in incorporating data science and machine learning in retail space to drive revenue and enhance personalized shopping experiences of Rue La La’s 20M members. In her spare time, she enjoys trying new food recipes, watching documentaries, and reading about interior design and house decoration.
Known as “Apple-sanctioned man-in-the-middle attacks,” the NSURLProtocol class is a powerful Foundation abstraction that intercepts network requests at runtime before they hit the URL loading system. It has been used to implement proxy-like functionality, stub HTTP responses, eavesdrop on your 3rd party libraries’ network activity during production deployments, arbitrarily transform URLRequests on the fly, or implement custom protocol schemes. Using this class well requires understanding of how it behaves at runtime, and there are a few runtime gotchas that you must know to handle!
NSURLProtocol to stub server responsesnil) in NSURLProtocolJames Graham
James Graham is a software engineer who deeply enjoys starting and building businesses from scratch. He received a Thiel Fellowship last year for his work on Caffei.net, which is the fastest way to establish a TLS connection between iOS and your api (your commerce app can make a lot more money by becoming way faster!). Used by the largest freelancer marketplace, a large-Boston based travel company, and other commerce companies around the world, Caffeine improves security by making PFS and certificate pinning automatic and free, among others.
Recently he has become interested in empowering and better tooling the “small guys” that all SaaS has so far ignored: senior citizens, immigrants, and people who Just Don’t Know by starting the Wallace Murry Phone Co. Wallace Murry is the only wireless phone provider based in MA. Wallace Murry doesn’t sell your data to advertisers like AT&T et al, puts on events/sessions at low-income community centers that promote digital literacy (how to use a mouse, keyboard, email, google maps, etc), won’t sell you an unlimited data plan if you don’t need it, and is staffed with people from your local community who pick up the phone instantly if you call with any questions related to your phone (or beyond!).
Wayfair has one of the largest iOS teams in Boston, with around 40 developers all working on a single product. Our codebase is large, it has a sizable amount of legacy code, and it is extremely active and constantly changing. Because of our size and scale, we are starting to encounter problems that impact our entire iOS team. These include:
In order to help combat these problems, we decided to start the process of modularizing our codebase. I believe our work to solve these issues can be applied to teams and organizations of any size. I’m confident that everyone will be able to take something away from my talk, be it big or small, and apply it to their own teams to help them work more efficiently and build great apps.
Brad Smith
Brad Smith is a Senior iOS Engineer at Wayfair. He is a southern transplant into New England that is still coming to terms with weather other than “Hot” and “Very Hot”. He has worked on iOS at various mobile agencies and product companies over the last 5 years. While not writing and reviewing code, he spends his time snowboarding, playing ultimate, and eating lots of yummy food.
Writing code is a combination of creativity and logic. Every developer wants to make sure their work is feature-perfect, bug-free, and provides a delightful experience to the end user. But how do they make sure that their code maintains the quality they consistently strive for? How can they write code that is maintainable, stable, and offers a learning opportunity to other team members? In this presentation, Jayesh Kawli will describe the process of reviewing code and how it helps to write high quality, crash-free code that is confidently written and thoroughly assessed.
When asking “When should my code go through code review?”, the answer should be “Every time you change the codebase!”. A change to even one line of code can cause catastrophic effects to app quality and customer satisfaction, which has a direct impact on company revenue. “What is the process for code review?” There are many answers to this question and we will discuss some of the more successful strategies that have been used to date.
Jayesh Kawli
Hello, I am Jayesh Kawli. I live in Boston, Massachusetts. Currently, I am working at Wayfair as a Senior iOS developer. I have been writing iOS apps for more than 4 years. At Wayfair, I work with checkout and shipping team which is responsible for handling cart, payments, loyalty and gift cards in the application. Previously at Wayfair, I worked on the Platforms team which handles core architecture, network/data layer and general performance optimization of the application.
In my spare time, I like to work on side-projects and open source libraries. Currently, I am learning to speak Spanish and it’s going really well. I also write a blog at https://jayeshkawli.ghost.io which touches active topics in iOS development along with occasional off-topics such as food, travel and web development. My open source projects can be found on my GitHub page.
At Arc Publishing, a new venture that is a part of The Washington Post, we have begun building native mobile applications for other news publishers, like The LA Times, The Salt Lake Tribune, and The Globe and Mail, to name a few. We’re now in the process of scaling to 50 iOS apps, that have millions of users, wildly different feature sets, and that have to be kept synchronized with each other. To achieve this feat with a small team, we’ve had to template our architecture and automate our entire development and deployment process. Come learn how we built a scalable white label iOS app architecture in Swift that powers some of the App Store’s top 150 news apps.
Arthur Sabintsev
Arthur is one of the lead iOS engineers at The Washington Post. He currently leads mobile development on the “Arc Publishing” team, building native iOS and Android apps for news publishers around the world. He has also taught Swift & Objective-C at various code schools, acted as a technical reviewer on books on Swift, and over the last 6 years, has authored a couple dozen open source libraries for the iOS community. Before leaving his Ph.D. program, he was an experimental nuclear physicist who worked underground colliding subatomic and subnuclear particles.
Swift is in a unique position at this moment in AI technology.
First, machine learning models can run in iOS and with only a few lines of Swift Code. We will discuss 1) what machine learning is good for in local apps 2) what a machine learning model is, 3) how it gets packaged by CoreML, the new iOS format for deploying ML in your app, and 4) how to leverage it in your Swift-based apps - without needing to build a lot of specific code!
Then we will take a look into the future with Swift for Tensorflow, the brand-new technology by Google that would let us leverage our Swift knowledge to create and train new machine intelligence!
Ray Deck
Ray is CTO of Element55 in Cambridge, MA. Element55 provides automatic and mobile time capture solutions to major professional service firms around the world. Ray’s initial background was as a quantitative analyst at dotcom-era startups, but after a shift to software, Ray has been developing developers to make products in data and mobile since the days of Blackberry. Machine learning has brought this full circle!
SwiftSyntax is the Swift project’s library for working with Swift source code. In this workshop, you can learn how to rapidly prototype linting and formatting tools from the library’s author. No prior knowledge of SwiftSyntax is required, but a good grasp of Swift itself will be necessary. Note that SwiftSyntax is only available in developer snapshots of the Swift toolchain; please install the latest Trunk development (master) toolchain snapshot before the workshop from https://swift.org/downloads.
A 16 year old inspired me to learn to code.
This lit the fuse that would take me on an amazing journey through challenges and victories while creating an app to help victims escape domestic violence and abuse.
This is my story.
This is the story of how someone with no coding experience got their app approved for the app store. There were challenges along the way which were far outweighed by the success, impact and achievements. Since its release, the social impact of the application has been incredible. Then a global technology giant came knocking, which brought a new life of excitement as well as being completely overwhelming. This story serves as an example of why women should be recognized as an equal and important part of the tech community.
Come meet the Oprah of technology.
Juggling is often used as a metaphor to represent the idea of dividing your attention between multiple tasks at once. But not this time! This is a talk about actual juggling, the math behind it, and the exercise of representing that math in Swift.