dotSwift 2016

Last friday Tomas and I went to dotSwift 2016 at the beautiful Théâtre des Variétés in Paris. We enjoyed talking to fellow Swift developers and listening to great talks. The seven twenty minute talks and a series of even shorter lightning talks provided a lot of interesting information to think and talk about.

Our main takeaways:

• Swift on the server is really coming! The first web libraries are available, people are enthusiastic about it and it’s already possible to deploy an experimental setup to for example Heroku. We’re excited to play more with it and hopefully use it in production some day!
• Do not, I repeat, do not write your own formatter. Apple has formatters for nearly everything and has covered more edge cases than you can even dream of. So use the formatters Apple provides and give your app that little bit of extra localization love.
• Protocol-Oriented Programming is a very interesting technique. Rob Napier had a nice talk where he showed how you could go overboard with too many layers of protocols. A nice reminder of how important the “keep it simple” mantra is.
• It’s easy for anyone to join the Swift evolution mailing list and talk with the developers about what your ideas are for the next version of Swift. They are really interested in what users of the language run into and what would make it a better language.

There were much more interesting points made and I would really recommend watching the talks when they become available online on The Dot Post!

Ps. The afterparty also was awesome! You should really consider joining us and all the other developers at dotSwift 2017.