AltConf 2015 Highlights

Power Up Your Animations! by Marin Todorov

Marin Todorov, the author of iOS Animations by Tutorials, is a rare kind of speaker who is eloquent, always has well-written slides or demos, and keeps a good balance between diving into live coding and showing its outcome. This talk was no exception.

Not only did he show how easy it is to create animations with his new library EasyAnimation, but he took it a step further to show how you can leverage those animations and create a delightful user experience.

Kudos, Marin!

Correct Behavior Through Type Safety, by Justin Spahr-Summers

Justin is a personal favourite, but of course, I am biased because he is a ReactiveCocoa core team member!

The talk explains how a powerful type system enforces correctness in a system. It means the compiler serves as a safety net instead of your users. Something really interesting came out: unit tests, although highly recommended, can’t replace a strong type system when it comes to catching bugs.

Justin finalized the talk by briefly explaining how Reactive Cocoa 3.0 takes of advantage of it. He also gave his opinion on the Swift 2.0 error handling model, and how it differs from the one used in Reactive Cocoa.

A Eulogy for Objective-C, by Aaron Hillegass

I had mixed feelings early on. Aaron joked that he didn’t see Swift as an improvement to Objective-C. But in my opinion, he redeemed himself by showing his vast knowledge of how Objective-C became what is today.

I also loved the bits of trivia he shared with the audience. This talk is a must watch!

Planetary Engineering, by Mike Lee

Mike Lee took us on an amazing journey. He started from where we are today and continue onto where the human race is heading. And also to what degree we, as engineers, are responsible for what lays ahead. He painted the picture that because we possess creative minds, we should use them for the greater good.

Though it was by no means a technical talk, it was one of the most interesting and well-presented talks at AltConf. If you enjoy TED talks, then this also a must watch.

Functional Reactive Awesomeness With Swift, by Ash Furrow

Ash is one of the most famous speakers in the iOS community, so my expectations were high. He nailed it by showing functional concepts in a easy-to-follow manner, and he also nailed the part about why we should care.

He showed how he uses a functional reactive approach to create simpler flows inside an app, which makes maintenance and extension easier in the long term. As he spoke, I also got to learn about RxSwift. Since I am used to ReactiveCocoa, I typically don’t bother looking for similar libs, but I have to say that RxSwift is appealing.

Overall Thoughts

Overall, the conference was great and a nice mix of technical, design, business, and inspiration talks.

There were some minor nuisances that caused some complaints — the biggest one being lack of Wi-Fi. Yes, there was no Wi-Fi at a developers’ conference! I can sort of understand that, because it’s tricky to find a suitable venue close to Moscone, but still, access to Internet is a no brainer.

The second shortfall was the lack of proper coffee. I think I am just spoiled, because UIKonf had a very good coffee on the conference premises, and we were in the Bay Area after all.

Connectivity and coffee issues aside, it’s very difficult — if not impossible — to find a cast of so many good speakers in one conference.

All this begs the question: is it worth the time and money to go San Francisco if you don’t get a WWDC ticket, just to attend AltConf and socialize? In my opinion and the collective opinion of the raywenderlich.com team, yes, it is!

The raywenderlich.com WWDC 2015 Team Dinner

Did you attend? What did you think about the talks? Which was your favorite and who do you hope to see there next year? Chime in below!