Deep Dish Swift '24 - Day Three
Recapping the third and final day of Deep Dish Swift.
The third and final day of Deep Dish '24 started with an Apple Event watch party. I ended up being a few minutes late thanks to the thunderstorm and subsequent traffic jam near O'hare. It was a pretty different experience to be sat with a bunch of Apple fans while new products were announced. Not quite like WWDC '19, but it had the same sort of feel. Nice to see Apple giving the iPad lineup some improvements, but I still can't get over the mess that Apple Pencil lineup is. Also not super pleased that my M3 Pro chip is already old news...
Brad Larson kicked off the day's talks with what AI/ML presentation that I can only describe as "completely over my head." I mean this in the most respectful kind of way. His talk was focused on "differentiables" in Swift and it went deep on how and why he and his colleagues are pushing to get them integrated into Swift proper. I aspire to be this smart. He also mentioned PythonKit, which I'll be trying as soon as I have the time. I'm looking at you Fast F1.
Since SwiftUI is kinda my thing, the next talk ended up being the highlight of the day: Jessie Linden's, "Grand Gestures in SwiftUI" was all about creating complex gesture interactions with pure SwiftUI and it was just so well done. Any speaker that can cover the how and the why of a complex SwiftUI scenario has my attention. I couldn't keep up with my notes, but luckily she's open-sourced her slides and example code. Just awesome stuff that I will surely be using.
Tim Condon then went deep on @Sendable and quickly had me realizing that my app is going to need some refactoring for strict concurrency compliance 😬. I jotted this down in my notes, "I need to reread Dony Wals' book on Swift Concurrency."
"Is Your App Secure?" was next, delivered by Kabir Oberai, a student who also works at Automattic on Texts + Beeper?! He showed us live how hackers can do all kinds of things to alter or intercept our apps' actions and some simple methods we can deploy to better protect ourselves. My notes say, "this kid is going places..." though as I write that, I realize he's already arrived. Kabir mentioned Sim Genie, which I hadn't heard of, but will probably check out.
Daniel Steinberg had the whole audience laughing out loud with his talk on SwiftData. It was a great reminder of just how complicated this stuff is. He gave a thorough and entertaining overview of all the ways Core Data influences SwiftData which served to highlight just how much better SwiftData is...but also warned that we might be careful before jumping in to SwiftData with both feet. If he's ever speaking at an event near you, go.
The day wrapped with a fun musical performance by James Dempsey and the Breakpoints and a closing keynote by Dave DeLong. Unfortunately, I had to miss the last half of the closing keynote, but my guess is that Dave was pushing for our community to do more to organize ourselves and help one another. I was picking up what he was putting down.
Deep Dish Swift '24 Overall Grade: A.
This is such a solid conference. It's the right size and brings a good balance of technical and philosophical talks. The speakers are leaders in the community and the community itself is full of friendly and interesting people. It isn't overrun by sponsors and the venue is quite nice (though a little chilly). Rumor has it that Deep Dish '25 is a go and I'm quite pleased to hear that. The food was solid too.
Bravo to Josh and the rest of the team that pulled this conference off, again.