Swift Anytime Delhi Meetup — My First Talk

A few weeks ago, on 24th September 2022, I attended a Swift iOS meet-up organized by Swift Anytime at the Gojek Office in Cyber Hub, Gurgaon. It was my first meet-up, and I was fortunate to give a lightning talk at the event. It was a wonderful experience — I met a lot of iOS developers, heard their perspectives, got the experience of giving a talk, and so much more.

This post summarizes the event and my experience as both a participant and a speaker.

Prologue

"You can have anything you want, if you want it badly enough." — Abraham Lincoln

I always look for upcoming iOS conferences and share them with my team so we can plan and attend. I was casually going through my LinkedIn feed when I came across this meet-up. I got excited — this was an in-person event I could actually attend. I shared the details with my team and saw a lot of people get excited too.

After some discussions, we concluded that we should try to contribute if possible. Since I network on LinkedIn, I was already connected with the founder of Swift Anytime. I reached out and discussed ways we could contribute. That conversation turned into a casual chat and eventually into him inviting me to the event as a speaker for a lightning talk about my career journey.

I was quite surprised that my career journey could be shared as a talk. I was also a bit scared — I had never given such a talk, and so many questions were running through my head. But thanks to the professional and personal growth I had gained at Expedia, I took a deep breath and accepted the challenge. I was going to my first ever meet-up as a speaker.

The Event

The Beginning

I reached the event venue with mixed feelings. It was raining heavily, and I was afraid people wouldn't show up. To my surprise, a lot of people came for the meet-up! I was excited to see so many people interacting with each other.

I was not alone from Expedia — I was fortunate to be accompanied by colleagues from the team.

I met Yaseen Majeed, a fellow iOS developer who came from Kashmir to attend this event! It was astonishing how important this event was for iOS developers in and around Delhi, as it was the first event after COVID.

Opening Talk — Swift Anytime Vision

The event started with an introductory talk from the founder Mayank Gupta. He shared his vision and mission for Swift Anytime and the iOS meet-up — helping build a community of iOS developers in India that thrives for growth and success. He encouraged us to participate, contribute, network, and grow together as a community.

Kanishka Chaudhary — Growing as an iOS Developer

The first talk was presented by Kanishka Chaudhary, iOS consultant at Loyalty Juggernaut. She shared her experience on how she contributes as an iOS developer, how she reviews PRs, and how she works with different architectures. It was a quite informative session focused on how one can grow as an iOS developer.

My Talk

The next talk was mine — I shared my iOS career journey, the roadblocks, and the key takeaways. I focused on the major events of my career, how I overcame roadblocks, and concluded with some valuable lessons. I also used this chance to promote Expedia Group.

Other Notable Talks

Exploring Background Execution in iOS — Amit Sawant

Amit Sawant, Senior iOS dev at Gojek and a member of Swift Anytime, focused on exploring background execution in iOS. The talk covered all aspects of background execution and how to leverage Apple's APIs for a smoother app experience.

Visualizing Human Motion Capture in SceneKit — Sahil Sahu

Sahil Sahu, 3rd year student at IIIT Delhi and intern at Tweek Labs (a sports tech startup providing motion capture sportswear), demonstrated visualizing human motion capture in SceneKit — showing how the app correctly captured the motions of a bowler.

Exploring MusicKit — Rudrank Riyam

Rudrank Riyam, iOS Developer Relations Engineer at Codemagic, explored the latest MusicKit API with a demo showing how to build a custom UI experience and curate recommendations based on user-provided metrics.

Journey from MVVM to TCA — Rajmani

Rajmani, Lead Engineer at Tokopedia, discussed how Reactive Swift (RxSwift) works as triggers for communication between View and ViewModels and the problems faced. He then introduced TCA (The Composable Architecture) — a library for building applications with composition, testing, and ergonomics in mind, usable in SwiftUI, UIKit, and on any Apple platform.

Model View Approach — Ravi Dixit

Ravi Dixit, full stack developer and creator of the CodeCat15 YouTube channel, focused on the Model View approach — emphasizing proper research before adopting approaches shared online in blogs, articles, or videos.

Dependency Injection — Sandeep

Sandeep, Principal Engineer at Ixigo, introduced Dependency Injection — why we should use it, how to implement it correctly, and the advantages it brings.

Breakout Room

We had a fun activity session where we formed groups of 12 and interacted with each other. We talked about a lot of stuff and bonded. It was great interacting with fellow iOS developers and hearing their perspectives on iOS development — our common frustration with Intel Macs and gratitude for M1 Macs, coding standards, strategies, and processes at different companies.

Takeaways and Learnings

This was my first ever in-person meet-up. I got to interact with so many iOS developers. It was amazing to be surrounded by like-minded developers across different companies.

• We had healthy conversations about UIKit vs. SwiftUI and how much scale companies have adapted SwiftUI — Expedia is leading this field compared to most competitors
• Giving a talk was an amazing experience — I'll work towards helping others from EG get the same opportunity
• The talks provided good knowledge takeaways — some refreshed fundamentals, others covered advanced topics
• Networking with so many people in a single day was the best part — I connected with a lot of people that day

That pretty much wraps up the event! I had an amazing time interacting with iOS developers, giving my first talk, participating in the breakout room, getting guidance, and offering it to others. I hope we get to do this again sometime soon.

Some pics from the event