I was invited to run a couple of workshops on The Professional Mobile Conference in Warsaw. This was not an ordinary conference talk (it sounds like I am veteran, but really I am not ), but as 5 hour intensive live coding session. I brought the idea to the Tooploox forum and the answer from the team was “Go for it”. So I went.
I needed a plan to start. We made 2 assumptions about the conference organizers. First, the workshop was going to be more about language (Swift), than platform (iOS) and Second, that the level of the participants would be at least medium. With that in mind I rolled up my sleeves and started working on it.
Finally, on the workshop day (24.08.2015), I arrived to Nowe Horyzonty center half an hour before the time. The area was big with buildings tightly packed next to each others. It was hard to realise that there was an IT conference going on, but it all changed when I reached the 5th floor where the event was taking place.
It was nicely organized taking into account that it was the first edition.
The workshops were supposed to be called “The Swift Way” but due to organizational issues we had to leave the working title of “Swift 201”.
Let me start with the difficulties I encountered. The main problem was the group composition. The average level of Swift and iOS knowledge was “medium”, meaning that most of the people had very entry level experience but few of them were really advanced. That kind of groups are really challenging to teach! Anyway, I started with introducing myself and my company, Tooploox, then I moved onto the meaty part, the actual coding workshops. To make the long story (5 hours!) short, we started removing storyboard files, implemented FlowControllers and wrote views purely in code. After that, we talked about Swift structs, enums and protocols and how to use them. We implemented models, networking layer and added a few extensions to make our work easier. There wasn’t time left to cover unit testing as broad as I would like to but we managed to write some.
In my opinion, the workshops went well. The format was demanding and new for me. I had poll results how participants rated my presentation. Every area was scored between 4.5 and 5.0, which is not that bad. I answered many questions after the workshops. Some of them were related to Tooploox and I hope that I got some people’s attention and inspired them about our great and not so small company. Everything finished around 18:00. I wanted to stop by our office in Warsaw on my way to downtown but, by the time I was around the Technical University underground station, it was after 19:00 so I decided to leave it for the next time. They are moving soon anyway.
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Graphics by Anna Langiewicz
