OSCON 2018 Recap

Photo by O'Reilly Media: https://www.flickr.com/photos/oreillyconf/43498186701/

A few weeks ago I attended, and spoke at, my 10th OSCON conference. I regularly say that OSCON is my favourite big conference, and every time I attend I’m reminded why I love it, and how much I love it: OSCON is a fun, relaxed, and very approachable place where companies and people involved in open source as contributors, consumers, and users, interface, work with, and have fun with each other. It’s unique in perspective, content, and value. And it’s super engaging everywhere from the lunch hall to the hallway to the sessions and in between. You should go, if you get the opportunity (O’Reilly runs a wonderful diversity and inclusion program, which make me able to help you make it along!)

This year was OSCONs 20-year celebration event! 🎉 If you have a Safari subscription, you can check out the videos from the event here. There’s also a collection of keynotes and interviews from the event on the O’Reilly Media YouTube channel.

On the Monday, Tim, Jon, and I presented a 3 hour session on Open source game development with Godot. Godot is an amazingly polished, and entirely open source, game development engine; Godot is a project of the Software Freedom Conservancy, and is aggressively competitive against the big commercial engines, like Unity and Unreal. I largely led this tutorial, supported by Tim and Jon. We got great feedback from our attendees, and had a full house. I’ll post the material from the workshop in the coming week.

On Tuesday, Tim, Jon, and I presented a 3 hour session on Machine overlord and you: Building AI on iOS with open source tools. We covered everything from CoreML, to Vision, to Apple’s Turi Create Python libraries. Our attendees loved it, and gave us great feedback; it was a fun precursor to our new book, Practical AI with Swift (more on that soon!) You can find the material from this OSCON session right here.

On Tuesday night, I stepped way, way out of my comfort zone and presented a 5 minute Ignite talk on The realities of weightloss. This talk was based on a seed of an idea that Mars had, which I’d taken and run with in a slightly different direction (with her permission). It seemed to resonate with the audience, and I got a lot of thanks, and hugs, from people afterwards. ❤️

The next day, Wednesday, saw us doing our traditional book signing (for the latest Learning Swift) in the O’Reilly Media booth of the expo. We had a huge line of people, and signed for about 45 minutes. It was great fun! The O’Reilly staff treat us like royalty, which always makes us feel very special.

On Thursday, in the second-last slot of OSCON 2018, Tim and I teamed up with Mars to deliver an entirely-live coded talk on Learning Swift with Playgrounds. Mars wrote all the examples, designed the flow, and really got thrown in the deep end—and she totally nailed it! Tim provided an excellent narration of proceedings, as Mars live-coded her way through the demos (with Xcode crashing, as is custom!) We got many fabulous reviews, with the talk getting a 4.9/5 ⭐️ average. We were thrilled. You can find some notes here, and the fabulous Playground that Mars wrote here on GitHub.

Our friends, VM, Josh, and Paul, also delivered well-received, and awesome talks.

We really love working O’Reilly, particularly our amazing editor, Rachel Roumeliotis, who has risen the ranks of the company while we’ve been working with her (absolutely no connection to us working with her!) and is now a VP of Content Strategy.

We’re doing a bunch of great projects with O’Reilly over the coming year or two, including finishing up a new edition of our iOS Swift Game Development Cookbook, as well as a new Unity Game Development Cookbook, a Head First Swift book, and a brand new title, Practical AI with Swift. More updates on all of these soon!

Our latest edition of Learning Swift is available, and getting a bunch of great reviews, and our Mobile Game Development with Unity remains a fabulous guide to building games with Unity. Check them out?