APP BUILDERS SWITZERLAND 2016

App Builders Switzerland 2016 was an amazing event organized by the SMDA for the developer community and took place on April 25 and 26 at Technopark Zurich. Apps with love supported the organization of this event as Diamond Partner and contributed an event app that helped the organization to interact and communicate with the attendees

SPEAKERS AND ATTENDEES FROM ALL OVER THE WORLD

The agenda of speakers was amazing considering that this is the first time the event took place. A wide range of presentations for Android, iOS or cross-platform developers and designers were shipped to Switzerland from all over the world. The event was sold out with people joining from places such as Spain, Italy, Ukraine, Romania, France, Germany, Austria, but also from oversees like the US or Argentina. About 200 Attendees from 24 countries! Here's a shortlist of speakers with links to their Twitter profile:

Damian Mehers, Adrian Kosmaczewski, Natasha Murashev, Enrique López Mañas, Anastasiia Voitova. César Valiente, Marin Todorov, Chris Lüscher, Sebastian Vieira, Graham Lee, Alexsander Akers, Etienne Studer, Orta Therox, Daniel H. Steinberg, Vikram Kriplaney, Lorica Claesson, Sally Shepard, JP Simard, Sergi Martinez, Sangsoo Nam, Nicolas Seriot, Andreas Vourkos, John Sundell, Steve Scott, Julien Decot, Tal Heskia, Wei Wu

HIGHLIGHTS & INSIGHTS

I very much liked most of the presentations. However, some of them really grabbed my attention. For example Marin Todorov shared non-tech tipps to become a better developer. From meditation to learning new stuff to saying "no" and setting the right priorities there were a whole bunch of very useful insights for me in my daily work. One of my favourites was the presentation of Alexsander Akers, who explained why accessibility is a priority and not just another optional add-on to your development efforts. He demonstrated how easily many of the common accessibility features can be integrated and gave many useful insights. Another personal highlight of day one was Junior B, who spoke about asynchronous programming with RxSwift in a very fresh way. Even for me as a non-developer this presentation was real fun. The highlight at the end of the day was Adrian Kosmaczewki's talk about "being a developer after 40", preformed in such a great way that this presentation made it to the top of my personal list of favorite talks. Other great presentations came from Lorica Claesson who taught the crowd about material design for Android and Uepaa who were on stage to teach the devs about how proximity technologies are revolutionizing the mobile experience.

The second day of #appbuilders16 kicked off with an amazing talk by Kevin Goldsmith about mistakes, the gist being "don't punish yourself for failures, celebrate that you could learn something from making them". Later on John Sundell explained Spotify's concept of "dynamic, native, backend-driven UIs". Live Coding and immediately seeing the impact on the UI was great for me as a non-techie. We as Apps with love are actually already using a similar approach, yet we are happy to learn more in this field. Orta Therox shared his opinion about "Moving to Open Source Software by Default" which opened my mind on this topic. Finally I liked the design specific presentations of Wei Wu about Design Styleguides and Preben Thoro who shared psychology insights that help to create better user experiences (UX). Of course there were many other great talks that would be worth mentioning here, but I suggest you check out the event application and perhaps download the presentation decks from the github link provided below.

AN EVENT APP - OUR CONTRIBUTION AS A PARTNER

As a partner from the very start, we thought that there should be no developer event without a proper event app. Therefore we have designed and developed a basic event app with the following features to make the experience of attendees even better:

• Event agenda with details of each presentation

• Favorite and reminder function

• Event news and Twitter feed about this event

• Photo gallery

• Location based messages with beacons and geo fences

• Survey feature to get feedback from attendees

• General Information

#APPBUILDERS17

App Builders Switzerland 2017 will be held in Lausanne on April 24-25, 2017. We're looking forward meeting you and many more interesting people there.

FURTHER SOURCES

Arno uploaded some presentations to github
Google Spreadsheet (translation template) for text localization
Slidedeck from Adrian Kosmaczewski about "Being a developer after 40"