WHAT I'M WORKING ON
Goodbye to another conference
Last week I attended Swift Connection in Paris. The conference was amazing. I met so many familiar faces, and I also met many new ones who have been following my work for years.
The talks were great, and they shared a lot in common. Many of them were about change and the changing environment. I think the biggest confirmation of that is the fact that Swift Connection, formerly known as FrenchKit, is about to go away. This was the last edition.
And honestly, it makes me think about conferences. Yes, they are fantastic, and we do need to keep finding places to get together as Apple engineers, but are conferences with tech talks still the future? If AI starts to write more of our code, what's really the value in it?
Instead, I think I would love to focus more on conferences that talk about product value, like how you can make Apple Search Ads more valuable or "I optimized my App Store page and this is what I did." I feel like the practical parts of app development are becoming more and more important and can have a bigger impact than a tech talk on SwiftUI architecture.
Nevertheless, it's extremely sad to see a conference that's been with us for so long go away. I truly hope the trend of new conferences continues because, yes, some go away, but we also received quite a few new ones over the past year. Let's at least not forget to meet each other in person and learn from each other's experiences.
