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First of all — bonjour! 🇫🇷 As you can gather from our Magazine, we love improving our skills and knowledge. This time around the love took us to dotSwift, a conference centered around Apple’s programming language Swift. For those of you who did not know, dotSwift is one of the projects of dotConferences, a series of developer events held in Paris. Along with the lecture sessions on February 3rd, there were two more days of workshops. Unfortunately, we got our tickets quite late so we missed the opportunity to be a part of them. Nevertheless, we wrote a summary of the lectures. Off we go!

About

The dotSwift conference venue, the beautiful Théâtre de Paris, opened to the public at 9:30 AM with breakfast provided! The theatre was the perfect location for a conference this size. It provided a great space for socializing, food & drinks during the breaks. With good organization, amazing French snacks and interesting company, fourteen talks went down with ease. They were split into four sessions. Naturally, SwiftUI, propertyWrappers, and Combine were mentioned quite a lot, but there was still enough diversity to make things interesting. The speakers did a really good job presenting their topics in a concise and enthusiastic manner. If you continue reading, you’ll see we outlined some of our favorites in the next paragraph 👇 . The breaks were perfectly timed and gave us the opportunity to meet the sponsors and to win some cool prizes. After the last talk, networking continued at a local bar.

Overall, we were quite pleased with the conference. We are sorry we did not get the chance to attend the workshops, but judging from the talks, they were well organized and informative. What we would like to see improved is the schedule on their web page. It just outlined the general format and speakers, with no specific talks so we were not quite sure what to expect. Also, we really hope to see more tickets for the workshops in the years to come!

Our Favorites 🎉

As we mentioned before, we decided to point out some of our favorite lectures!

#1 – MVC with Sugar

Ever heard of MVVM, MVVM-C, Clean, Viper? Which of these architecture patterns is the perfect one? Guilherme Rambo argued that we don’t have to look further than the one Apple keeps supporting – MVC. Guilherme took an interesting approach and solved common objections to MVC. He also warned about the temptations of adopting new architectures just because we’ve read about them on Medium. We recommend taking a look at the slides:

• GitHub - insidegui/mvcwithsugar: Companion Playground for my talk at dotSwift 2020.

#2 – Swift Techniques for Testing

It is really interesting to see all the solutions the community has come up with, regarding new function builders that were introduced in Swift 5.1. Kaya Thomas showed us one of the solutions that help to test by grouping assertions. A less obvious technique Kaya showed us was using enums to make usually messy UI Tests much easier to read and write. Make sure to check out her talk here:

• Swift Techniques for Testing - Kaya Thomas at dotSwift 2020.

#3 – SwiftCrypto

The closing speaker was 🍎 Apple’s Software Engineer Cory Benfield who talked about cryptography and has announced SwiftCrypto – Apple’s new open-source project for Swift ecosystem. It allows Apple CryptoKit APIs and its set of cryptographic operations to be used by Swift developers regardless of the platform on which they deploy their applications. Read more about SwiftCrypto here!

All in all, we would call this conference a success! 👏 We enjoyed the speakers and the topics and would like to go again! If you have any questions and would like to know more, feel free to hit us up on Twitter.