👋 Our new book on Unity is about to come out! We think it’s our best yet. If you’re interested in game development, please check it out?
Tag: books
Software Architecture NYC 2019
The O’Reilly Software Architecture Conference 2019 (SACon) just wrapped up in New York City, and I was privileged enough to attend as a speaker with my friend and colleague, Tim, and partner and colleague, Mars. Together, we presented a session called Entity-Component-Systems and you: they’re not just for games anymore, and Tim and I did a book signing for our recent title Learning Swift (3rd edition), as well as a Meet the Experts session.I was initially quite sceptical of the SACon, because the idea of an event based on ‘software architecture’ conjured up images of very dry sessions on traditional, serious enterprise architecture, presented by uninspired, uninspiring people. As it turns out software architects, and those who attend software architecture conferences, are incredibly passionate, interesting people, who are the very opposite of the straight-laced faceless people I imagined.
SACon was a melting-pot of interesting ideas, framed around the discussion of software architecture as a profession. O’Reilly’s conferences are always polished, well, run and all that good stuff (disclaimer: as might be obvious, O’Reilly is my publisher), but the attendees and speakers are what makes any conference shine. This conference definitely shone.
All the sessions that I attended were excellent, but the highlights of the conference for me were definitely the following talks:
- Katerina Iliakopoulou’s talk on architecture of the New York Times recommender systems
- Vasanth Asokan’s talk on the architecture used to test in production at Netflix
- My friend r0ml’s talk, Technical Debt: a masterclass
- Seth Dobbs’ talk on leadership principles for architects
- The keynotes from Trisha Gee, Mark Richards (interviewed by Neal Ford), Stuart Halloway, and Glenn Vanderburg (go and check out the list of recommended wide-reading he posted after his. keynote, too!)
The ‘hallway track’ was also exceptional, and we had some fantastic conversations with attendees on topics ranging from the rise of the Rust programming language to the use of ECS in non-video games to the merits of the Swift programming language to designing video game engines, and beyond.
Tim and I really enjoyed our book signing, and found ourselves face-to-face with one of the biggest queues we’ve ever had for a book signing, and had some excellent conversations with developers, architects, and team leads who were excited to learn Swift from our book, or share it with their teams back home.
Our ECS talk went well! We had a packed room (which was also one of the most palatial conference halls we’ve ever spoken in!) and got 5-star reviews with great feedback.
If you’re interested, you’ll find the slides from our talk on ECS are available via the conference website. You can also find a video embedded below, or on YouTube, or O’Reilly’s Learning Platform. (if you have an O’Reilly Learning Platform subscription, we strongly recommend watching it there!)
There’s some follow-up resource we want to share with attendees of our talk. We hope you find them useful!
- Catherine West’s RustConf closing keynote on Rust for Game development
- Entity Systems are the future of MMOG development by Adam Martin
- ECS and DoD slides by Aras Pranckevičius (Unity)
- Data Oriented Design and C++ CPPCon talk by Mike Acton
- Machine Architecture: Things Your Programming Language Never Told You talk by Herb Sutter
- What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory paper by Urlich Drepper
- The amazing talk on Blizzard’s implementation of ECS in their popular game, Overwatch, from GDC 2017
I’m excited to return to a future SACon! The good news is there’s lots of them to choose from! San Jose is coming, as is Berlin!
iOS Game Dev Cookbook
Also available via O’Reilly’s Safari, if you have a subscription (a free trial is available!)
OSCON 2018 Recap
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?
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite tweets of the event, which someone sent following our Learning Swift 3rd Edition book signing:
I can’t wait for next year’s OSCON: July 15-18, again back in Portland!
Latest Swift book: Learning Swift
Learning Swift (3rd edition), my latest book on Swift, covering Swift 4 and beyond, is available now. Check it out on Safari, or from your favourite retailer of books.
Content for you!
This is a bit of a bump of an older post, with a few updates to highlight the new stuff we’ve been working on for our publisher, O’Reilly Media.
Our brand new Unity game development book is out! This is one of the most exciting books we’ve ever written, and you can own it now! (Or read it on O’Reilly’s Safari Learning Platform!)
We also have a bunch of awesome video training on game design, game art, game programming, and game promotion, also available on Safari:
- Designing Games that People Want to Play
- Getting Started with Game Development in Unity
- Developing 3D Games with Unity
- Creating 2D Games with Unity
- Creating First-Person-Shooter (FPS) Games with Unity
- Creating 3D VR Games with Unity
- Creating Narrative Games with Unity
- Just Enough Game Art
- Getting Your Game Out There
We’ve also got some recent “Learning Path” videos, exclusively out on O’Reilly’s Safari platform:
- UIKit Dynamics for iOS
- Constraints in iOS
- Table Views in iOS
- Getting started with Swift on the iPad
- The Basics of Designing 3D Art
with Blender and Unity
Our newest books are also available now:
- Early Release of Learning Swift 3rd Edition (covering Swift 4)
- Learning Swift 2nd Edition (covering Swift 3)
(also on Amazon) - The Kerbal Player’s Guide
(also on Amazon) (also check out our talk “The Mun and Back”, from OSCON 2015!)
One of the best ways to look at all the training and material we create is on O’Reilly’s Safari platform (which has a free trial). It’s like Netflix for technical training and books.
More soon! ❤
Kerbal Player’s Guide
Our new book is out! We worked really hard on this amazing book! Learn about space, astrophysics, and Kerbal Space Program, the best realistic space program simulator!
Online Swift Training + Book
We’re running iOS Development with Swift (programming) training online for O’Reilly Media in July. Registration is now open, and we’d love to have you aboard! Over two days, we’ll take you from no Swift to enough Swift for iOS apps, and an understanding of how to use the iOS frameworks. You can learn more, or register on the O’Reilly website. Attendees of the online training also receive a copy of new book, Learning Swift.
If you just want a discounted copy of our latest book, Learning Swift, you can currently buy the ebook at 50% off through O’Reilly’s Swift sale! Use the code WKLSWFT (works until 5 AM San Francisco time, on June 11).
Swift is open source!
… and I’ll have more to say on that topic soon! In the mean time:
- Jon and I have written a post on Swift for the O’Reilly Programming blog, it’s the first of three, and it covers why Swift is an interesting language;
- I’ll be speaking at the Functional Programming Miniconf, at linux.conf.au 2016, about (you guessed it) functional programming with Swift! (registrations for linux.conf.au 2016 are open until January 29th!)
- our new book, Learning Swift, is getting rave reviews, and is nearing final release; you can buy it now in Early Release, and get updates!
More soon!
Learning Swift for Swift 2.0 book
Early Release of our new Swift 2.0 book for OS X, iOS, and watch OS! Grab a Preorder at Amazon or buy the Early Release (with updates) at O’Reilly right now (50% off with code WKIOS9 for this week).
Dr Paris Buttfield-Addison 