The UIKonf folks have published the recordings of all talks of the 2015 edition of the conference. Here are my favorites (in chronological order).
Mike Lee: World Modelling
When Mike began speaking about rabbits, foxes, and predator-prey cycles, I was sure his talk would turn into a lesson about the survival chances of indie developers on the App Store. Thankfully, I was wrong, because what followed was much better. This is a very inspiring talk about a topic that you wouldn’t expect to hear about at a tech conference.
The video on YouTube (33:05 min)
The slides
Mike Lee on Twitter
Mike’s blog
Marcel Weiher: Software Architecture
No programmer can avoid thinking about software architecture. Whenever you write code, you have to make decisions about architecture. Software architecture can be categorized into styles, such as call (functions) and return (values), message passing, or dataflow/reactive.
Marcel argues that the predominant style (call and return) is not a good match for the dataflow-oriented/reactive nature of interactive GUI programming. He’d like to see programming languages that are explicitly designed for this style. Unfortunately, Swift isn’t such a language, and may even be a step back in this regard compared to Objective-C whose dynamic nature enables many Cocoa features that are crucial for UI programming.
The video on YouTube (34:43 min)
The slides
Marcel Weiher on Twitter
Marcel’s blog
Ash Furrow: Teaching and Learning
I’m here to persuade you all to write a blog and to release open-source code as part of your jobs. I’m hoping that I can convice you that not only is that good for your personal career, but it’s also really good from your employer’s perspective.
The video on YouTube (28:17 min)
The slides
Ash Furrow on Twitter
Ash’s blog
Halle Winkler: Duct-Taping the Gates of Chaos Shut: The Weird, Little, Useful, Sustainable Indie
Halle talks about all kinds of things she learned from running a small but successful indie business, ranging from what to work on to how to engage with your customers. Really helpful insights.
The video on YouTube (36:48 min)
Halle Winkler on Twitter
Halle’s website
Brian Gesiak: iOS API Design: Swift Patterns
None of the patterns in this talk are complex, difficult to implement, or even particularly inventive (and I mean that in the best possible way). In fact, most are common sense. Yet I found myself nodding along the whole time, thinking, “of course that’s how I should have done it all along”. This session contains lots of practical advice Brian has cleary learned from practical experience maintaining APIs that must change all the time.
The video on YouTube (24:27 min)
The slides
Brian Gesiak on Twitter
Brian’s blog
Graham Lee: Object-Oriented Programming in Objective-C
If you think you know what object-oriented programming is, watch this one.
What’s the main drawback of Objective-C over Smalltalk? It’s C. Rather than being able to rely on the object-oriented properties of programs to help us understand them, we can just write a load of C code that we wrap up in methods and call it “object-oriented”. …
Is Object-Oriented Programming actually that silver bullet [that allows us to write reusable components]? … Most of us will never know, because most of us aren’t writing Object-Oriented software.
Enlightening and thought-provoking, like all good talks.
The video on YouTube (31:10 min)
Transcript of the talk
Graham Lee on Twitter
Graham’s blog