… and it was pretty awesome.

I’m not an Apple developer, but I was lucky enough to be able to attend the recent /dev/world conference. I also was able to go to the pre-conference drinks, where I was able to meet a few of the speakers and organizers.

It eventuated that the organizers found out that I did public speaking, and that they had an issue where a speaker was unable to attend at the last minute. A small amount of being ‘voluntold’ later, and I was put on the bill for the conference.

/dev/world is awesome. If you have anything to do with Apple, or iOS/OSX development, I highly suggest getting yourself to one of these events. The closest thing to owning an Apple product is having a now-defunct iPod Nano cc. 2007. But even I could enjoy and learn from the two days.

But it’s not just an Apple centric conference. Software development is language and operating system agnostic, and there are still many themes that cross the boundaries.

I’d actually first heard about /dev/world via seeing a promotional video for the ‘world famous’ /dev/world quiz. It was a very good way to socialise over dinner, and even though my team may have not done as well as others, it was a very enjoyable evening. Not only was the quiz and dinner lovely, Paul Fenwick gave a keynote, which is always a wonder to behold.

The one main take away from this conference is that Keynote has an ‘Anvil’ transition, and it is highly overused. :p

Talks of Note

With so many talks across two streams, here are just some of my highlights, which I recommend you watch the videos for:

Maintaining Sanity and Code - Bogo Giertler

“Friendships die in code review” - @giertler, #devworld

Let’s Make a Multiplayer Game in Forty Minutes - Jon Manning

Yes, Jon was able to make the game in a dash under 40 minutes.

“Lag is the thing you hate the most when you create a multi-player game.. It’s the thing you learn to really despise” - @desplesda #devworld

User Testing: Finding That One Thing Meatloaf Won’t do for Love - Nic Wittson

Getting fresh, new users to test your code is as important as getting expert users to test, and cross-platform test, that regression issues don’t appear in your codebase.

iOS Apps with Go - Josh Deprez

I’m always interested in how you can use other languages in toolchains, and Josh’s talk was just the ticket for getting away from Swift.

Physics and Other Tweaks Your Users Will Love - Tim Nugent

Skeuomorphs!

“You don’t need ridges on an iPad keyboard, cos you can’t feel them” skeuomorphs in < iOS7 @The_McJones #devworld

Social Interaction Over Shared Devices: Designing Interactive Story Apps for Children - Betty Sargeant

Betty’s talk was very good at explaining to the audience how the different users of our products have completely different requirements from what we expect. Her discussion about making interactive experience for children on mobile devices reinforces the fact that the choices we make as developers need to take into account our audience and their expectations.

Paint All the Code - James White

I really like SVG and vector graphics, so PaintCode is right up my alley. James didn’t even have any slides. It was all a live demo, apart from the one title slide, which he reproduced in PaintCode anyway :)

Surveillance in a Mobile World - Tom Karpiniec

Speakers opinion: “If you run a forum without an anti-harassment policy, that’s just as bad as having a forum that’s unencrypted” #devworld

Videos from /dev/world are being uploaded to the AUC_ANZ

My entire tweet stream from /dev/world