Swift Heroes 2018. Short overview
By: Maxim Kovalko
Tags: iOS, Swift, Italy, Conference, iOS App Development

On November 9, an iOS development conference was held in Turin. The event gathered about 500 participants from all over the Europe and was held in the historical center of Turin — Centro Congressi Torino Incontra.

Conference organizers — Synesthesia and SYX.

There were talks from quite famous speakers in the iOS-community. Among them, the author of the Sourcery library, several authors of courses on “Raywenderlich”, the creator of “Hacking with Swift” and others.

The conference was held in 2 parallel streams, talks were divided into keyouts and workshops.

Of course, one of the most interesting parts of such events is networking. It was interesting to have live communication with people from the industry who I follow on Twitter. Also I’ve used their tools and frameworks. They make a significant contribution to the growth and development of our iOS community :)

For example, I’ve managed to talk with the author of Sourcery (I think every iOS developer respecting himself knows what it is) Krzysztof Zablocki, ask him about future plans and releases.

You can see all videos with talks below.

1. Krzysztof Zablocki, Co-founder of Pixle — Lead dev at NYTimes

iOS Application Architecture

Design Patterns are part of your toolbox, but you need to be pragmatic

MVC vs MVVM

ViewController is part of a View layer in both patterns

Biggest mistake people make with both patterns -> lack of router

Details about what Flow Coordinator is and how it fits those pattern

2. Paul Hudson, Creator of Hacking with Swift

Separation of concerns: Refactoring view controllers live

We all know that massive view controllers lead to equally massive problems, but sometimes it’s not easy to know where to start when you want to make things better.

In this session I’ll present an example Swift app, walk through the many structural problems it has, then refactor it live on stage so you can see exactly how it’s done. The end result will be a smarter, simpler architecture that is more testable, more scalable, and most importantly more maintainable.

There are a number of targets we’ll be investigating, such as:

Relocating view code to a sensible location

Spinning off delegates and data sources to new classes

Using coordinators to simplify navigation

All this will be done with live coding on stage, so you can follow along.

3. Tim Condon, Software Engineer @ BBC and Founder of Broken Hands

Getting started with Server-Side Swift and Vapor

With the release of Vapor 3, Server-side Swift and Vapor have started to become mainstream and adopted. This talk discusses the benefits and advantages of using Swift on the server and Vapor. Then, see how to build a full CRUD API in 15 minutes with a live demo.

4. Elviro Rocca, Lead iOS Developer presso Facile.it

Advanced Swift Optics

Functional optics, like lenses and prisms, are incredible tools for manipulating data structures in a declarative and composable way.

Let’s take a deep dive into functional optics in Swift. In this talk we’ll explore more optic types than just Lens and Prism, and unlock their ability to compose at multiple levels. We’ll then leverage composition to operate on complex data structures, avoid Optional handling with the Affine optic, and explore more sophisticated usages that go beyond data manipulation.

5. Stefano Mondino, Mobile tech leader @ Synesthesia

RxSwift for UI: the tips & tricks your views were waiting for

RxSwift is a well-known, broadly adopted reactive framework that is sometimes used only for network-related stuff such as API calls and chaining.

This common misunderstanding steers developers away from such powerful yet complex framework, as they can’t see why they should go through the (steep) learning process just to refactor some networking code.

Let’s prove them wrong! RxSwift and RxCocoa are also great for UI stuff, and can dramatically increase development speed when combined with UIKit components.

6. Daniel Leivers, Freelance iOS Developer

GraphQL for mobile developers

GraphQL was released publicly in 2015, since then it has become popular as an alternative to traditional REST APIs. For iOS developers a number of open source projects have sprung up to help iOS developers interact with GraphQL servers.

In this talk we discuss why GraphQL might be useful for mobile developers, demonstrate how to create a simple iOS app with a popular GraphQL client library, compare that to a REST implementation, and cover some of the potential pitfalls that might occur.

7. Vadim Drobinin, iOS Developer, IT-Consultant, Public Speaker

Debug like a Pro

The majority of engineers either debug using print()/NSLog, or utilize debugger for `po` command and ordinary breakpoints, However, Xcode and its debug tools give way more power, starting from powerful LLDB command language and runtime breakpoints logging to Instruments for performance and CPU investigations. I will cover the best practices, talk about most recent changes from WWDC 2018 and show quite a few examples, where meaningless at a first sight error message can be expanded to a call to action using proper debug tools. By the end of the talk, everyone should learn how to debug like a pro.

8. Michael Flarup, Danish designer, entrepreneur & keynote speaker

Designing Better App Icons

This session is packed full of stories, advice and pixels as hell blow your mind with a neon-infused journey that teaches you how to create the single most important visual aspect of your product; the App Icon. Learn why Icons are the most important visual aspect of your product and get to know the five core aspects of successful Icon Design. There’ll be something in it for everybody whether you’re just about to make your first app icon or a seasoned veteran.

A really upbeat exploration of app icon design ranging from 30–60 minutes in length (or up to a full day if made as a workshop). It gives people both some practical advice specific to making icons, but at the same time uses this specific craft as a key to uncovering universal qualities in design. Can be given as a standalone inspirational talk or as part of a hands-on workshop where I provide the tools and guide participants in making icons. I have been giving variations of this talk / workshop for 3 years now, and it is always a great and fun experience where I get to share one of my big passions with the audience and teach people some universal qualities that can be used- not only in icon design but in making things in general.

9. Ellen Shapiro, Native mobile developer

Siri Shortcuts

Developers have wanted the chance to interact with Siri since it was first announced, but until iOS 12, it was limited to a small group of developers. In iOS 12, the power of Shortcuts allows you to much more fluidly interact with Siri, and have your application work with powerful system-level Shortcuts.

You’ll learn about the award-winning indie app that became Shortcuts, the easy and hard (and maybe even Galaxy Brain) ways of working with Shortcuts, and a few limitations of Shortcuts that will leave you itching for iOS 13.

10. Rikke Koblauch, Product designer

If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail

I want to walk you through different ways to test ideas and assumptions without building anything but instead, use what’s in front of you. The value of finding a niche user group and how to find your way to them.

11. Manuel @stuffmc Carrasco Molina, Certgate GMBH

IThe importance of privacy — a look at the karma-oriented APIs

A lot of time Privacy of my data as a user is not a priority for Developers. Wether it’s my calendar, my contacts, my location, I want as a user to be able to use an app without all of those attacks in my privacy. I want to sumarize some things an iOS developer should do to ensure the most critical user can still use my app in some regards, and not just say “I need all your information” like on other platforms. This is the beauty of iOS, being able to fine grained (although not enough) so let’s do this all together, as a beautiful community concerned by Privacy.

12. Antoine van der Lee, iOS Engineer @WeTransfer

Speeding up as an iOS developer

Get the best out of Xcode and speed up as an iOS developer by automating tasks and setting up an efficient environment in Xcode.

Antoine van der Lee shares his learnings from over 8 years of iOS development to learn you how to indicate repetitive tasks and improve upon them.

13. Marco De Nittis, Tech Leader at Synesthesia

React Native & Swift: best friends forever

React Native is one of the most interesting technology for building cross platform mobile applications.

With React Native is easy to build a complete app from the ground up, but it’s also possibile to let both techology cohabit peacefully.

In this talk we’ll discover how React Native works and how to integrate it with a Swift native application in order to get the best from both worlds.

14. Tomas Camin and Francesco Bigagnoli, iOS Developers at Subito

Two years of UI Testing

UITesting, is a great tool to automate testing of iOS applications and has been constantly improved by Apple since its introduction in 2015.

In this session we’ll share our experience leveraging this technology at a large scale. We’ll provide a set of good reasons to start adopting it showing how we managed to solve its main pitfalls with some custom developed tools.

15. Calogero Sanfilippo, iOS team lead @ Accenture

Demystifying ML in iOS

Machine learning (ML) is the science of giving computers the ability to learn without being explicitly programmed and it has become so pervasive in today’s technology that we often use it without even knowing it.

In the last two years, Apple put significant focus into his machine learning frameworks, facilitating the integration of ML in iOS with the introduction of Core ML and Create ML.

We will start with a high-level technical explanation of ML before exploring and demoing the new frameworks for ML integration provided by Apple.

You will learn how to start from scratch and end up with a full working ML integrated app.