Try Swift! NYC

This year I had the opportunity to attend Try Swift! NYC, a conference dedicated 100% to Swift development.

This is a fairly new conference, the first edition was back in March in Tokyo, but the organization level was excellent. From the initial website, the registration process, pre-conference events, the conference itself all was great.
It all started with a pre-meetup party on the Meetup headquarters in NY, the nice folks of Meetup did a quick introduction and talked about their new app, 100% made in Swift, and then send us to a rooftop dinner and drinks!!!

Next day the event itself was in the Axa Event and Production Center in downtown Manhattan , this was a one track event and it all happened on a good sized auditorium, all very comfortable and with excellent audio/video resources. The presentations and  speaker were of high quality and they ranged from beginner to advanced topics.

My favorite presentations were:

• Random Talk: the Consistent World of Noise, excellent talk from Natalia Berdis about random algorithms and how to use it. Excellent  slides to show how different random algorithms works and when to use them.
• Lambda: There and Back Again, from Rob Napier simple down to earth presentation on how to use functional programming in Swift.
• Incremental Swift , Amy Dier talks on how Etsy is using Swift in their codebase. Very interesting to learn they try to keep everything done in Swift still easy accessible from Objective-C code.
• Making rich text editor in Swift, Katsumi Kishikawa with a very detailed talk about all the things you need to be aware when working with text in iOS. I learned this the hard way some year ago when doing the Aljazeera app.

Besides the presentations/speakers, the great thing about the conference was the community that was present, everyone was super friendly and always available for a chat. The speakers themselves were super friendly and made time during their time there to answer any question that you could have, in fact after they did their presentation they were available for an hour to answer questions.

The organizers themselves had super attention to detail, they provided every morning a set of basic toiletries, in case you had forgot something while packing. They had a magician as a break entertrainer to keep people energized between presentations. Of course good coffee was always available and the meals provided where not bad at all.

The only hiccup of the conference was the Pizza and Party event of the first night, it was a bit disorganized and the pizza took forever! Quickly sorted out by going out to local Pizzaria recommended by NY local.

Definitely going back next year! Keep up the good work Natasha the Robot!