Last week, I’ve attended UIKonf 2016 in Berlin, Germany. It was my third UIKonf in a row, and just like the previous times, I’ve enjoyed it very much. UIKonf has always been a very “friendly” conference with a very cooperative atmosphere. It also has a focus on the social aspects of a conference: it’s one tier, with talks usually lasting no longer than 30 minutes. There are 2–3 talks, and then breaks with up to 90 minutes, leaving a lot of room to speak to your fellow developers.
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Here are my main take-aways:
Swift is the default now. Last year, most talks that had code samples in them used Swift as well, but it was still in a “hey, we’re doing Swift now, isn’t it cool?” kind of way. This year, Swift was the default language without anyone thinking about it. There was still some Objective-C though.
Focus on social maturity. In the previous years, the focus was clearly a technical one. This year I had the impression that we were talking a lot about the social aspects of our work. How can we make code readable for others? How do we leave a positive legacy? What is the best way to work together?
Functional programming went away. Last year, a lot of talks were focused on functional programming. This year, only the “Reactive programming” workshop, which was a “talk” sponsored by Realm, was talking about it. Everyone else moved on. Even the MVVM-C talk was showing a non-functional way to implement the pattern. I personally find functional programming to be very hard to read and understand, so I very much welcome it.
Favorite talks. I loved the MVVM-C talk by Steve Scott. It was both entertaining and very interesting to see. I also very much enjoyed Daniel H. Steinberg’s “A Time Lapse look at Swift”. My other favorites were Ashley Nelson-Hornstein’s “Humanities x Technology” and Laura Savino’s “Reading in a New Language”.
I am looking very much forward to next year’s UIKonf. You can watch all of the talks on the UIKonf YouTube channel: Day 1 and Day 2.
