/dev/world Sessions – 2024

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Join us on an exciting journey through the evolution of the Kogan.com iOS app! Our journey commences with a dive into the app's initial state and the issues we were trying to solve with our ambitious move towards a modular architecture. We’ll carry on our journey with a deep dive into our experiences with the move, challenges we encountered along the way, successes we had, and changes we made to our original plans. Let’s explore together how we improved our app to a modular architecture and created a more resilient, scalable, and efficient iOS experience.

About the Presenter

Meet Gareth, a passionate iOS developer and current mobile tech lead at Kogan.com. With over seven years of expertise, he brings a wealth of experience to the table. Originally from Scotland, Gareth embarked on a new chapter by moving to Australia in January 2023. His professional journey has predominantly focused on retail apps, where he has left his mark working with a number of major UK brands such as Selfridges, River Island, and Wetherspoons before joining Kogan.com.

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The Vision Pro is weird y’all. While much of the tooling is the same as for iOS and Apple’s other platforms there’s a lot that’s different when it comes to building great experiences for this new kind of device. I've been hands on with the Vision Pro at work and have been building an app for it on the weekends. We’ll be taking a look at what it’s like to work as a developer inside of the Vision Pro. What the development exerince is like for the Vision Pro. Then some of the kinds of thigns you should be thinking about when creating a VisionOS app.

About the Presenter

James is an iOS developer, guess now visionOS developer too, working at Mantel Group in Melbourne. James is a self-confessed tech junkie and largely got into programming as an excuse to be able to play with tech all day. The Vision Pro is out and he wasn’t going to miss the chance to work with the latest bit of tech. James has been working with Mantel Group to show off what the Vision Pro can do for different clients. And in his spare time building an app for the headset. When not sitting at, or strapped to a computer James is off in a 4WDing to take landscape photos or painting minis for a D&D game.

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So you like Swift.. but you want to know what Golang is all about. In this session we’ll cover why you would want to be Go curious, what advantages Go might have, and why you’ll still like Swift for a lot of things. We won’t bore you with compilation speeds and how compact the binaries are, but instead will focus on personal opinions and learned experiences. We’ll cover the ins and outs of starting up with Go. The things you’ll hate about it as a Swift developer and the things you’ll like about it as a Swift developer. By the end you’ll even be able to quickly set up a web service and start serving APIs.

About the Presenter

Joel is the Vice President of Product Strategy at JumpCloud residing in the greater Minneapolis, MN area. He focuses primarily on the intersection of identity, users and the devices that they use. While Joel has spent most of his professional career focused on Apple products, at JumpCloud he works with a team focused on bolding going where no devs have gone before across all platforms. Prior to JumpCloud Joel was a director at Jamf helping to make Jamf Connect and other authentication products. In 2018 Jamf acquired Joel’s startup, Orchard & Grove, which is where Joel developed the widely-used open source software NoMAD. Installed on over one million Macs across the globe, NoMAD allows macOS users to get all the benefits of Active Directory without having to be bound to them. Joel also developed other open source software at Orchard & Grove such as DEPNotify and NoMAD Login. Over the years Joel has been a frequent speaker at a number of conferences including WWDC, MacSysAdmin, MacADUK, Penn State MacAdmins Conference, Objective by the Sea, FIDO Authenticate and others in addition to user groups everywhere. Joel spent over a decade working at Apple in Enterprise Sales and started the website afp548.com which was the mainstay of Apple system administrator education during the early years of macOS X.

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In March 2024, a rabble of retrocomputing enthusiasts on Mastodon put together a network for old Macs across the internet. Self-organised via Google Sheets, they joined together their various local networks using the long-obsolete Apple Internet Router 3.0 software installed on both real vintage Macs and emulators. Somehow, it all worked! The network was dubbed GlobalTalk - a reference to the legacy AppleTalk suite of networking protocols being used. By mid-March, GlobalTalk had already connected roughly 50 separate networks across the globe. This talk will include: • An overview of old Macs and how their networking protocols evolved from the early days through to today • Some details about how AppleTalk, Apple Internet Router 3.0, and the modern internet still interoperate • A bit of software and network protocol "archaeology" • A live demonstration of connecting to the network, and some of the cool things GlobalTalk participants did with the network, such as the HyperCard-based "AppleWideWeb"

About the Presenter

Josh's hobbies include the care and feeding of vintage Mac computers, recreational sysadmin, and ranked competitive computer touching^W programming. Josh is a Staff Software Engineer at Buildkite, where they work mostly on software written in Go. Previously, Josh was a Site Reliabilty Engineer at Google, in which they learned a lot about scaling enterprise networks and crawling the web. Josh is also a regular presenter at /dev/world and might give up the vintage Apple schtick one day...but not today!

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We're always told to care about security. And we do. I think. Maybe? No definitely. Anyway, I'm not the server, so I don't need to worry too much. Servers get attacked. People via email get attacked - and I barely check my emails. Yeah. I'm good. Just don't write bad SQL code and I'll be good. Yeah, that's what my awareness training taught me. This talk is going to focus on what the attackers are doing to attack people with a specific focus on developers. There will be case studies. There will be screenshots. There will be gasps. There will be gnashing of teeth. Want to hear what's new in cyber attack land? Let's talk about it :)

About the Presenter

Louis has written one of these for every /dev/world that has ever run (is that 16 now? Feels like it). He is a recovering developer who fell into security over a decade ago and loves the community and Apple products. Now he the lead Cyber Security Instructor for Lumify (formally DDLS) the #1 Cyber/IT/Process certification training organisation in Australia/New Zealand/Phillipines. He reguarly talks about development, security, brains, AI and whatever else comes to mind. He talks for a living. The trick is getting him to stop 😛.

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I've had an app with a large codebase in the App Store since 2015, which runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch and now visionOS. In order to stay current with newer technologies like WidgetKit, modern watchOS and now visionOS, introducing SwiftUI to the codebase has been esssential. This talk covers how I've approached building SwiftUI components for the newer technologies, while also gradually migrating existing UIKit components.

About the Presenter

Quentin is the developer of Streaks, which has been on the App Store since 2015 and won a coveted Apple Design Award in 2016.

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Understanding how your users interact with your app is important. Typically this involves pulling in a third party SDK and service and relying on its capabilities and limitations for real user monitoring (RUM), and then your data lies isolated in that third party's SaaS platform. But what if your app is more complex than a JSON pretty printer and has monitoring needs beyond user interactions? What if the third party gets acquired and raises their prices? What if you'd like to be able to see your app monitoring data alongside your backend data to make support easier? In the last few years the industry has introduced and started prompting OpenTelemetry as an open standard for distributed tracing, metrics and structured logging, and a lot of server-side software is moving to support it, including Apple! In this talk, Rob gives you an introduction to distributed tracing, and walks through adopting the tools that Apple provide for Swift on Server ecosystems and integrates them into a demo iOS app, showing you how to take your user monitoring and telemetry needs into your own hands and a stack you can own, highlighting the support benefits of being able to see the distributed trace from the user interactions all the way through the server stack. The example project from the session will be available on GitHub afterwards, including the sample Swift-based server.

About the Presenter

Rob started with Objective-C by trying to write an XMLParserDelegate with manual memory management in 2009. After releasing the first tramTRACKER™ app 6 months later he was hooked on iOS development and is mortified to realise he has now been building iOS apps for 15 years. These days he is a Principal Software Engineer at ANZ and is the iOS Platform Lead for the ANZ Plus app, working on a much more modern app stack with a much larger and more talented team.

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As an engineer, there seems to be a slew of contradicting advice on what to do about duplicate code. Never do it? Do it once then refactor? None of it really makes sense. This talk hopes to clear up the generic advice and add more subtlety to it. Audience members will learn some mindsets on how to reason about when to reduce duplication versus when not too, and they’ll also learn about connascence, a software quality metric & a taxonomy for different types of coupling.

About the Presenter

Hi I’m Sam Jarman, a kiwi living in Sydney, Australia. I’ve been a software developer for over 10 years and I am currently a principal software engineer and manager at Cochlear. Over my career I’ve have the pleasure of working at companies big and small and I’ve enjoy sharing the lessons I've learned along the way. Other than that, I am a proud husband, dog dad and iOS development fanboy.

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Let us deep dive into one of the most under appreciated tools that Apple produces, Swift Playgrounds. This story will be told through the solving of 3 ideas found in the life of the speaker and how Swift Playgrounds was a better tool than Xcode in developing these solutions. First we’ll look at how easy it is to prototype ideas in a matter of minutes on the go with an iPad then explore how to access the camera and microphone of the device, before integrating Apple’s Frameworks such as Vision and CoreML. Finally we’ll see how to test on real devices and deploy to the App Store without ever leaving Swift Playgrounds. The argument will be made that Swift Playgrounds should be the future of development on Apple Platforms for many situations and how we might see that become a reality sooner than you think.

About the Presenter

Stuart Varrall likes to solve problems and bring ideas to life through the use of technology. He’s originally from the UK, where he studied Computer Animation at Uni and worked on AAA console games before running his own mobile development studio. He did this for 10 years, starting out working on games for Nokia phones and ultimately developing for all mobile platforms working with companies like Adobe, Blackberry and the FIGC. Stuart transitioned to consultancy since moving to Australia 7 years ago and is now equally as happy working as a solutions architect at Google enabling AI for an Australian Telco, as he is making apps to keep his kids entertained on a car journey from his base in Rockhampton, QLD.

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Xcode Cloud has recently come out of beta. Apple generously offeres 25 hours free build minutes to all developers as part of the annual developer membership/fee. Initially it may seen to be intimidating to migrate across - however its surprisingly easy to move across or even integrate into a moonlighting project. As part of this talk I would like to discuss what is xcode cloud and most importantly what it isnt. I will also be comparing it with other CI/CD solutions that have been around for much longer. Depending on how we go with time - I would also like to setup a build pipeline and (if possible) try to send out a build via Testflight.

About the Presenter

With almost 15 years of experience in software development - Sushant Verma started a journey in iOS/Mac development in the early days of the iPhone. Over the years he has worked in a varierty of industries from ranging from the more rigid like banking, finance and insurance to the exhilarating like sports, social media and personal training.

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Bluetooth Low Energy is an excellent technology for offline-first applications. iPhones can communicate with multiple devices simultaneously without pairing at over 100m range, and the protocol is compatible with other platforms. This presentation briefly introduces Core Bluetooth and how its communication patterns can support your app. Then, we describe how we used common logic written in Rust to provide compatibility and code-sharing with Android, Linux, and Windows devices. We will share many tricks and quirks in helping your devices identify each other, stay connected, and achieve real-time performance while entirely offline.

About the Presenter

Thomas Karpiniec is a software developer specialising in cross-platform native applications. He has worked on Ditto’s edge sync platform for five years, building the peer-to-peer network infrastructure and integrating the communication capabilities of iPhones, Macs, and other hardware to create meshes that work with or without the internet. Tom lives in Tasmania and has previously presented at /dev/world, including running a workshop on Rust and Swift interop in 2019.

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Last year, Instagram launched Threads, the lastet app in Meta's Family of Apps. As part of the launch, an easter egg consisting of a spinning golden ticket was planted in the Instagram app for users to discover. This presentation provides a behind-the-scenes deep dive on how the visual effects for this ticket were created by the IG Labs team in Japan. It will include how the team researched and prototyped the idea, and how the physics animations, and metallic effects were created in UIKit and Core Animation.

About the Presenter

Tim’s been a fanboy of iOS since the iPhone 3G and a fanboy of /dev/world/ since 2010. He currently works as an iOS engineer at Instagram, and before that, at Drivemode, both in Tokyo. In his free time, he enjoys contributing to the open source iOS community, attempting karaoke and playing video games.

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Learn how DropBox and AirBnB run their Apple application development build and test pipelines, and specifically, how they streamlined their CI/CD operations and gained flexibility leveraging the power of the cloud, such as disk images, elastic storage, fleet level management, and granular access controls. Also, learn how on-demand access to macOS compute in the cloud allows developers to dynamically adjust the size of their fleet to meet their fluctuating build and test workload needs.

About the Presenter

Will is a Senior Solutions Architect at AWS, working with FSI FinTech customers. Since beginning his career on AWS in 2009, Will has never put his iPhone in a case. In 2018, he co-founded Rovercode, an initiative aimed at enhancing STEM education through robotics. His extensive experience with AWS took him on a global journey, leading to his relocation in 2020 from the Midwest of the US to Sydney. He now lives there with his wife, enjoying his collection of vinyl records and various Mac keyboards. While his professional focus is designing scalable, event-driven architectures for customers, Will also has a deep passion for all things Apple.

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Ready to revolutionize your development workflow and automate your app release processes? Join us for an immersive workshop where we'll dive deep into CLI tools in Swift, the Swift Build System, and Swift Package Manager (SPM). Discover how to leverage the capabilities of the App Store Connect API and OpenAPI to optimize your release processes, eliminate manual labor, and ensure seamless integration with evolving API schemas. Whether you're a seasoned developer or just getting started, this workshop is your gateway to mastering automation and streamlining your development pipeline. Don't miss out on this opportunity to take your skills to new heights. See you there!

About the Presenter

Alex is a mobile engineer at SafetyCulture, bringing experience from roles in corporate applications at leading banks and contributions to mobile core teams at companies like Grab and SafetyCulture. With a passion for optimizing developer experience and exploring new technologies, Alex aims to drive positive change within the team and the organization.