The Best of 360iDev 2017

As I once again sit in my local Starbuck's and indie coffee shops over the last two days, I'm contemplating what was the best of my time at 360iDev. On my flight home from Denver to Chicago, I had hoped to have time to think and reflect. Unfortunately, There was little to do but watch movies on my iPad as the woman in the seat in front of me had decided the four inches between my knees and her seat were perfect for reclining herself all the way back and snoring in my face. I put on my headset, and after my comments about Tron in an article earlier this week, watch a much younger version of two of the Babylon 5 cast and The Dude save the online world from greedy oppressive software, played by a guest star to Babylon 5, Star Trek and Dr Who. 

Today, sitting with my coffee, I have time to reflect on my time at 360iDev. Some companies require reports on conferences. Mine doesn't but this will be close. I've been inspired to write this week, but none of my writing was anything like a reporting of the good and bad of this conference, more reflections on themes like communication in teams and ethics in writing code. This time I just want to lis the highlight for me of 360iDev.

AudioKit

Due to the flight schedule and a conflicting event that weekend, my biggest regret was not attending the workshop on building instruments in AudioKit, an incredible open source framework of pro audio tools for iOS and macOS. 360iDev has workshops on the Sunday before the main sessions, and this was one of those sessions. I happened to be in the air on my way to Denver during this workshop. I've played with the framework a bit since I heard about the course using the iPad playgrounds version available on the developer site.

My goal is to build a few utilities and instruments to help me with my Ukulele playing. I've got a lot to learn, but I really like this framework which takes a lot of the heavy lifting out of sound work in iOS.

Night of Veggies and Voodoo Doughnuts

Once I arrived at 360iDev, I did meet the creator of AudioKit, Aurelius Prochazka. He had also organized a dinner meet up that first night for those who didn't eat meat. One of the traditions at 360iDev is The Night of Meat. This, the Night of Veggies was a similar dinner at a vegetarian restaurant in Denver for those who for whatever reasons don't eat meat. I'm semi-kosher, and the thought of risotto not ruined by scallops or prosciutto was enough to sell me. Walking to and from the restaurant, located about three-quarters of a mile from the hotel was an string of interesting conversations with many people, as was the very entertaining dinner full of conversation and connection.

That connection continued with my own organized morning walk of a mile to the Denver branch of Voodoo doughnuts. For those not familiar with Voodoo Doughnuts, they are a very quirky donut shop based in Portland Oregon. Instead of a plain doughnut they have some very themed and decorated doughnuts. The signature is the Voodoo Doll, complete with a pretzel pin. The doughnut is filled with raspberry jelly so if you poke the pin in the right place the doughnut "bleeds".

Voodoo opened a Denver Branch a few years ago. This counts as one of my top doughnut shops in the nation so I wanted to walk there. I organized a group walk in case anyone else wanted to join me. I met up there with a few people I'd meet and eat with throughout the conference . Once again the walk became a wonderful connection between people, including another speaker who gave a great talk on Bezier Curves and the apple pencil later in the conference. I had a discussions about exercise, the upcoming 32-bit culling of the app store, and my own efforts to get one app back in the app store.

Slack and Beacon

For a conference about developing apps, apps were also a tool for organizing the conference. 360iDev is unlike any conference I've ever been to. Often as in the Night of Veggies and Voodoo Doughnut walk, it was attendees or speakers making the events, not conference organizers. It was as simple as communicating to everyone "Hey, I'm going to Voodoo Doughnuts, want to come along?" This was a pattern that happened over and over again. Breakfast, Dinner, Pokemon Go Legendary raids, Special interest groups and Ice cream socials was just a few of the events participants organized, all with the help of two Apps: Slack and Beacon.

Slack was our primary communication tool, both for direct communication and for announcements and links. Speakers would post their links for downloads of speaker resources on one channel, and may, Like I did, have their own channel for questions or contribution to discussions about their talk. I had heard of Slack before, but never really used it. For a conference of this scale at least, it was a powerful tool, one that set the scene for the conference. It was primarily Slack conversations that blew my mind before the conference.

Beacon is an app I hadn't heard of before, but found it to be another great organizing tool for conferences. As a general app, the user can organize events with their Twitter followers, receiving comments and counts of people who plan to attend. Using passes, Beacon can have private channels for conference attendees to organize events among themselves, like I did with the Doughnut walk. As we had one person who due to traffic ran late, I was able to coordinate with her, and meet her at the store through the app's communication system.

Not Running Away From the Big Issues

Before this week, I really didn't realize the one huge difference between 360iDev and WWDC that would make me choose 360iDev over WWDC every time. WWDC by its nature is a corporate run event, and must always put on a happy face, showing the rosy view of the world. Apple is there to sell Apple products by giving Apple API's and other Apple stuff to developers. While extremely polished, there really is little room for the shadow side of computing, things we as developers should be aware of and be responsible for. While Apple might introduce a product like HomeKit, there are meager picking on writing code for Internet of Things devices to provide security for the user and for larger networks. While growth is important to Apple shareholders and the microscope of the media focusing on Apple, there are limits that must be acknowledged, limits which if passed are dangerous. While Apple might walk the talk with diversity in their presenters, they don't directly take on the issues of bias in developing apps beyond localization and accessibility APIs.

In one 360iDev I got hours of that, both in keynotes and sessions. This conference, by being independent of Apple, has the freedom to talk about thing that are critical to App development a corporate conference can't. This conference can bring in jailbreakers and ex-employees of Apple who see the weaknesses in Apple. It can talk about that shadow side, about larger developers who aren't here and how they might ruin it it for all of us with there own big data collection and manipulative practices. It was not done to make a doomsday scenario not just for disparaging remarks, but more along the challenge discussed in another piece: Here's more of the truth. What can you do to change it?

Running on the track

The Grand Hyatt Denver had a treat for me I used almost every morning: A running track on the roof of the garage. This was my morning ritual, getting up at dawn when the track was quiet and running a mile or two. As a distance runner, I usually run longer, but I'm also used to a much lower altitude than Denver, and the track was perfect for that morning shakeout run. Had this been a longer conference, I probably would have left the track for 5 to 10K in the neighborhoods around downtown. But the mornings on the track were the perfect start of my day.

Swift Playgrounds

My talk reflecting my own LinkedIn Learning course was about Swift playgrounds. What I found in talks I attended is that Swift playgrounds, especially on the iPad, has been quickly adopted by the developer community as a great way to demonstrate code. Some developers were building tools for communication between developers and designers. In under a year, this had become the prototyping tool I was speaking about, one that can be the back-of-the-napkin for Swift code.

There was of course two exceptions to that. One I had hoped wasn't going to be brought up, since it pretty much killed my talk. Its still not easy, at least until iOS 11, to distribute or share your playground. The other, was ironically education, the reason Apple came out with Swift Playgrounds. Instead of starting with playgrounds, educators find dumping students straight into Xcode is more effective.

From what I saw from other speakers and my own large attendance, I'm betting Swift playgrounds on the iPad will be a very common tool for developers, especially if Interface builder shows up in some way.

The Source of it All

The core of a lot of what made this such and incredible experience is the Conference organizer and founder of all the 360 conferences: John Wilker. As a first time attendee, I don't know if he tells this story every conference, but it really summarizes his philosophy of running these things: John once went to big professional conference, with lots of notable stars in the industry. At one point, he saw many of those well known names gathered together, and he tried to approach their circle, only to be shut out of the group. Many of us have felt that way, of how unapproachable the speakers are, how the Cliques make such strong barriers you don't get to know anyone. John wanted to change that, and this was the result. Clad in shorts and t-shirt the entire conference John did everything everywhere, including timing me in my room and finding my missing power adapter. He talks to everyone and put all those things that made this a conference which had tons of professional information but felt as comfy and familar as the Hawaiian shirts I wore all conference. He pretty much forces speakers to share space with attendees so we all talk together. You need not go far into one of John's favorite books The Cluetrain Manifesto to describe this conference:

Conversations among human beings  sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

360iDev was so different than the closed, contrived places that many trade shows I deal with are. I prejudged this conference, with my mind blown due to the open discussion and bright atmosphere. John even quoted my first article in this series in his Keynote.

I'm already blown away with the organization before the conference, and how much I've learned about other apps and frameworks I'm not using. I'm even more blown away by something I never have the courage to do at most conferences: feeling welcome to talk to the other speakers. That is a welcome change.

What impresses me even more than that was 360iDev was not hype. In something rare and very cherisehd these days, John delivered. He did a lot of work to be sure, but he delivered by getting all of us involved in one way or another. I have no idea what the next year will bring, but I would love to present and attend 360iDev again next year.

Steven Lipton is the mind behind makeapppie.com for learning iOS app development. He is the author of several books on iOS programming and development. He is also a LinkedIn Learning and Lynda.com author. His latest courses are Advanced iOS ApplicationDevelopment:Core Motion and Learning Swift Playgrounds Application Development