Swift Leeds 2024

This year I was fortunate enough to get a ticket to Swift Leeds, a conference about Swift in (you guessed it), Leeds. It was my first time attending a Swift specific conference, as in my day job it’s not a language I use but as I’m learning Swift development and it was local to me it felt like a good conference to go to.

It was also my first time going to Leeds Playhouse, as I’m an uncultured swine and haven’t been to the theatre in well over 20 years. It was a really good venue for a conference, the layout lending itself naturally to such an event.

Talks

There were a couple of talks that really stood out to me. Some were really in-depth looks at specific things and some were high level but aligned more with my interests.

Introduction to WebAssembly for Swift Developers — Max Desiatov

This was a really insightful talk on how Swift can be used to target WebAssembly and how to use tooling to better understand how WebAssembly is working under the hood.

I really liked how the talk had a lot of practical examples, not only showing how to target WebAssembly but how the underlying virtual machine that it runs on works, showing how the stack operations work with local and global state.

The demo of building a plugin for a synth was really cool too, explaining how synths work and building one using Swift and all the benefits that has and then showing the final WebAssembly and how you can get a easier to read version for debugging.

Hidden Engineering Challenges of A/B Testing — Anastasia Petrova

My day job doesn’t really involve a lot of mobile work so I haven’t had a lot of exposure to A/B testing in the mobile world so I found this talk really insightful, especially as it highlighted some issues I know I’ll face when I start publishing the app I have in development.

It was really interesting to hear about the complexities that mobile faces with A/B testing as the release cycle and application of cohort changes differ from web.

The main reasons being that on web a user automatically gets the most up-to-date version of the code and that new code can ensure they are seeing the changes we want their cohort to see. With mobile it’s possible for users to be on different versions of an app and you have to manage when to switch the experiement on from first registering them in a cohort to applying the change, which isn’t always easy.

I also liked the way that Anastasia touched on user consent and the UX of A/B testing as I have found it better to use the “feature preview” approach better than just forcing new experiments on people.

From Side Project to Going Indie — Antoine van der Lee

This talk was one I was very exited about as it covered off the journey Antoine took with his app RocketSim to go from working a 9–5 for someone else to striking out as an independent.

The most interesting part of the talk for me was when he talked about how he was regularly posting about the technical side of the app he was building but was told that he needed a “personality” behind his account. This made me think about how I post online, where I have a range of posts about things I’ve built but nothing really about me.

This talk certainly gave me a lot to think about as I plan to develop and launch my own app and how I can bring everyone along with me on the journey I take.

“Mobile”

I think the most impactful part of the event was getting exposure to people who work in a different subset of tech to myself. Even though it was a Swift conference I would say that 90+% of the people I spoke to were primarily working in mobile, and it was really cool to see their perspectives on things.

As a web developer and someone who exists mostly in the web space I’m used to talking to people about a wide spectrum of technologies and languages, something that has meant that I’ve never really been able to deep-dive into anything specific because there’s such a broad set of tools to remember.

But in the Swift space it appears there’s a narrower scope with two languages to worry about (or one if you’re fortunate enough to not have to deal with Objective-C and UIKit) and I have to say this is appealing to me.

If I think back to a recent project I was building and how I decided to work with Django for the first time in years to build out a prototype I feel a similar sense of scope reduction. I didn’t have to think about which JS Framework to use, which transpiler and bundler to use, which browser APIs to worry about. I just wrote some Python and spat out HTML and it did the job.

I now understand why mobile is alluring for developers, you learn one stack that evolves slowly, you learn the rules of the platform and with code re-use and being able to deep dive into things you build up a framework for shipping your ideas fast. The web as much as it’s quick to publish has such an overhead for a new project that it gives you analysis paralysis.

Hopefully as I work on my own apps I’ll be able to do this knowledge building myself and get to a point where I can execute on my ideas quick, using the Swift ecosystem as an enabler for doing so.

Take aways from the conference

I had a really great time at Swift Leeds and will look to go again next year, hopefully with a talk to deliver if I have a good story to tell about my own journey launching the app I’m developing.

It was really good to meet the local Swift developers and I’m looking forward to attending Leeds Mobile, the local mobile developer meet-up in going forward.

I think the key takeaway for me is understanding my own journey in this new space and how I can best tell the story of what I’ve learned so others can get something out of it.

Now I’m off to build synths in Swift!