Conquering Your Fear of Adopting Swift

Presented by Brennan Stehling at the Swift Language User Group on 02.25.16

Transcript

1. CONQUERING YOUR FEAR OF ADOPTING SWIFT YOUR FIRST STEPS !
2. WHO AM I? Brennan Stehling iOS Developer since 2008 I've built apps using Objective-C long before ARC, Blocks and GCD. A lot has changed since 2008.
3. SUMMARY ▸ Who is the audience? ▸ What’s going on with Objective-C? ▸ Why Swift? ▸ How can we minimize costs? ▸ What are the risks?
4. WHO IS THE AUDIENCE? ▸ Developers who want to move to Swift ▸ Managers who feel Swift is too risky
5. WHAT’S GOING ON WITH OBJECTIVE-C?
6. WHAT’S GOING ON WITH OBJECTIVE-C? THE HERO YOU DO NOT EXPECT BUT GETS THE JOB DONE
7. WHAT’S GOING ON WITH OBJECTIVE-C? ▸ Seasoned over multiple decades (NeXT) ▸ Proven APIs and Frameworks (lots of kits) ▸ Not going away anytime soon ▸ Legacy rooted in C ▸ Complex builds (Header search path?) ▸ We can do better with Swift...
8. WHY SWIFT?
9. WHY SWIFT? THE HERO WHO CAN TAKE ON A ROOM FULL OF PROBLEMS
10. WHY SWIFT? Chris Lattner, Quentin Tarantino of the Apple universe. LLVM IS GOOD. SWIFT IS GOOD.
11. WHY SWIFT? Swift has many advantages over Objective-C ▸ Optionals are a superpower ▸ Languages features prevent errors and crashes ▸ Syntax is easier to read (no brackets or semicolons) ▸ Enhanced modularization
12. WHY SWIFT? See Swift Thinking by Natasha the Robot Lots of helpful information to get you started on the right foot. ▸ http://sstools.co/swift-thinking
13. WHY SWIFT? Swift has many advantages over Objective-C ▸ Simplified tooling with Xcode (no header files) ▸ Frameworks are the primary building blocks ▸ Code boundaries which are now enforced (public, private, etc)
14. WHY SWIFT? Swift has many advantages over Objective-C ▸ Dependencies can be organized more easily ▸ Swift Package Manager (coming soon)
15. WHY SWIFT? What about CocoaPods? ! All those great pods may simply become Swift packages.
16. BUSINESS REASONS FOR SWIFT? ▸ Hiring Objective-C engineers is getting harder ▸ New projects are built with Swift more and more each day ▸ College grads are unlikely to learn Objective-C ▸ Swift will be less costly to maintain in coming years ▸ Apps built with Swift make users happy
17. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE COSTS?
18. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE COSTS? ▸ Depend on Swift ▸ Don't depend on Objective-C
19. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE COSTS? ▸ Depend on Swift ▸ Don't depend on Objective-C WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN?!
20. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE COSTS? ▸ Time updating legacy code is wasted time ⏰ = " ▸ Do not make your legacy code Swift compatible ▸ Just make your new Swift code compatible with Objective-C
21. HOW CAN WE MINIMIZE COSTS? Creating new frameworks with Swift as new dependencies can be made compatible with your legacy code base from the start.
22. WHAT ARE THE RISKS?
23. WHAT ARE THE RISKS? There are some risks, but at this point there's a lot of content shared on how to avoid the common problems. See recent SLUG talks. ! http://sstools.co/past-slug
24. WHAT ARE THE RISKS? ▸ Avoid structs ▸ Avoid tuples ▸ Avoid... See Michele Titolo's great talk which covers Swift gotchas. http://sstools.co/swift-protocols
25. FINALLY, EMBRACE THE FRESH START ▸ Approach your architecture with new ideas ▸ Rebuild your most unreliable code with a new approach ▸ Let go of techical debt which is been building up for years
26. MORE RESOURCES There are many ways you can use to get up to speed. ▸ Natasha the Robot ▸ Swift Blog (from Apple) ▸ iOS Dev Weekly ▸ iOS Bytes podcast
27. THANK YOU!
28. QUESTIONS? BRENNAN STEHLING @BRENNANSV GITHUB.COM/BRENNANMKE