TALKS AND PEOPLE FROM AROUND THE WORLD
App Builders 2017 introduced an interesting new format for three of the talks: Stories. The idea behind this, was to open up the discussion a bit and to not focus on mobile technologies only, but to get some broader insights into the three discussed topics. Steve Scott hosted these talks and asked the speakers lots of interesting questions. On top of that, the audience had the opportunity to submit questions that then would get discussed as well. That way, the sessions became entertaining and sometimes provoked unexpected answers and surprising perspectives.
One of the three speakers who shared their knowledge in this format was Martin Odersky, the inventor of Scala, who argued, that there isn’t really a conflict between functional and object oriented programming. Another very thought provoking interview was the one with Laura Kalbag who spoke about the topic of privacy and presented the ethical design manifesto. We'll definitely think of her talk the next time we sign up for another "free" service! Finally, particle physicist Sergei Gleyzer, who is according his own description “looking for new things" at CERN and who also is the founder of the Inter-experimental LHC Machine Learning Working Group, explained what particle physicists do and how machine learning is helping to analyze the vast amounts of data that are generated by the experiments scientists conduct at CERN.
Of course one can never attend all the talks one would like to attend, however we still want to highlight some of the speeches we have listened to and the topics they covered:
Maxim Zaks presented alternatives to the ubiquitous JSON in his speech “Talk binary to me”. He hopes that “you at least minify your JSON" and made a case to start thinking more in graphs rather than trees.
Marcos Placona held an interesting talk called “I just hacked your app”. His slides can be found here.
Elaine Dias Batista talked about Google Home and AI-driven assistants in general. She has published her slides here.
Andreas Vourkos talked about user retention in apps and what methods can be used for it. His topics included features and principles such as gamification, artificial scarcity, feel of ownership through customization and personalization. Find the slides here.
Peter Steinberger in his speech "Building a sustainable codebase: 7 years and counting", talked about the challenges he faced, how he tried to solve them and how it turned out a few years later. What he learned from his experience was very relatable for our devs.
Lorica Claesson talked about how to use animations for a better user experience. Among other things, she argued that costs for animations should be included in estimations so that there is a budget to delight the users.
Dennis Pilarinos gave a talk about "Putting together the best CI workflow for mobile apps". See one of his insightful slides above: Developers and users working together to build great applications.
Adrian Kosmaczewski gave a very entertaining talk titled “Developer's Guide To Migrate Across Galaxies”.
Meghan Kane presented the two options to implement machine learning in iOS in her talk "Getting started with machine learning in your iOS apps".
For sure we have missed other amazing talks. We look forward to hear from you either at App Builders Switzerland 2018 or here in the comments. Feel free to post a link to your slides if we have missed your great talk!
Some of the things we learned:
- The importance of accessibility: We tried using our phones while wearing an augmented reality headset that simulated vision impairment. A very valuable experience!
- Learned: Swift protocol associated types, swift scripting.
- New trend or possibility: Server side swift.
- Take-away for the whole conference could be: Beware of technical debt!
