AppBuilders Speakers!
We are happy to announce that we will take part of the AppBuilders conference on May 12th at 11:45 am (GMT+1) and in this post we will talk about how we got there and how Covid-19 impacted the whole process.
It was mid January when we decided as a team to participate in conferences around the world for the first time. We met to discuss what knowledge, tools and experience we currently had that could be helpful to the international community. Given our successful experience in iOS software development and the creation of popular OSS libraries, I decided to give a presentation on how we constantly achieve these goals by following a set of principles. Such principles are Culture, Motivation, Finding the right idea, Reaching out, Community driven development and Solid programming foundations.
Our goal was to communicate that through the expression of these pivotal characteristics in your work, you would be able to accomplish greater achievements. For instance, we became one of the Top 10 Swift Github accounts and one of the most engaging ones. So with that in mind we sent pitches to different conferences and were overjoyed to hear we had been accepted.
Handling the pandemic
However, Covid-19 struck soon after and conference organizers were forced to cancel most conferences or postpone them indefinitely, while also giving refunds. So, it seemed evident that conferences need to change, since not being able to meet each other in person doesn't necessarily mean we cannot connect with each other. Technology has broken the physical barriers of the world and even though it is not as glamorous or exciting as flying abroad to interact face to face with people who share your passion, technology still provides tools that render these meetings possible. That's why I'm super excited to be part of the AppBuilders Conference. They saw physical barriers and turned it on its head by reducing the cost of the ticket and opening up the conference worldwide through the Hopin platform. This way people all over the world can join and watch the best iOS talent worldwide and share their knowledge.
In addition, local meetups started opening up to online streamed meetups so that meeting could still be possible. Even though we will not meet in person, we still need to provide a similar experience and atmosphere that an international community conference provides. These are some of the changes we adopt at AppBuilders Conference to achieve this:
- Optionally pre recorded talks for better image quality and avoiding weird pauses with good editing
- Online Q&A while the video plays in case someone asks for something
- Add subtitles! For accessibility issues
- Shorten the talks to make them more dynamic. (Computer attention span seems weaker)
- Speaker face must be visible at all times
- The ability to create sessions with multiple people for workshops or topic discussions
- A random small chat picker where people are matched to chat for 2-3 minutes to simulate a real conference. We should regard this as motivation to keep working on our local communities, instead of shutting down the sharing of knowledge. We have the tools, all we need is the will to do it.
Join us at this great event!
So please come join us at AppBuilders Conference! There are a bunch of great speakers like Chris Eidhof (Founder @objc.io) Peter Steinberger (Founder @PSPDFKit),Shai Mishali (Creator of RxSwift) and other recognized people from the iOS community coming from big companies like Netflix, Calm, Raywenderlich and more. Even Paul Hudson (HackingWithSwift) is chipping in!
The event is taking place from May 10th to 12th and my talk is the last day at 11:45 am (GMT+1). See you there! Let's spread the knowledge!
