CocoaHeads March 2016

For CocoaHeads March I was inspired by one of our member’s other meetup groups, Triangle Open Source Open Mic, and decided to have ⚡️lightning talks ⚡️. We actually did this once before in December of 2013 and I’ve been wanting to do it again since then. Considering I only gave the community a one week heads up, I think this we had a great selection of talks.

The format is that each talk should be 5-10 minutes in length (including Q&A) and the talk has to follow normal CocoaHeads rules—it must be somehow related to iOS and Mac Development (of course tvOS and watchOS too). For a two hour event that means you can fit in about 10-12 talks. We had about 7-8 people sign up for a talk so I let the 10 minute rule stretch a little.

Below is a collection of all the talks with links and slides, if available.


Steve Foster on iOS 9 Search APIs

Something I’ve been waiting a long time to see at CocoaHeads, focus on iOS 9 specific APIs. There were a lot of new things released last June and we haven’t talked about it a lot. I hope to see more of this in the future.



Dan Leehr on Automating Screenshots with Fastlane

Dan who recently shipped a great app for working with Git Repos on iOS, Clone, showed off some of the great parts of Fastlane. Specifically the snapshot and frameit tools.



Kevin Conner on their library, Pinky Promise

Kevin talked about a new promise library they created at WillowTree. The library has the best name ever, Pinky Promise.


Jill Cohen on JSON Validation inside TWTValidation

Jill talked about her work adding JSON validation to TWTValidation. It allows you to validate JSON coming from remote resources using JSON Schema.



Rick DeNatale on his in progress magic app

Rick is interested in magic (not the game) and showed off an app he’s building to use when coming up with card tricks. Of course he ended with a little card trick too.


Rob Napier on his Observable<T> Gist

Rob talked about a small Gist he put up that provides a Observable pattern for Swift. He talked a little bit about putting it together and why. Check it out on Github, Observable<T>.


Carlos Santana on the work he’s doing at IBM on OpenWhisk

Finally, Carlos talked a little bit about a project he’s working on at IBM. OpenWhisk aims to provide a service much like AWS Lambda but will support Swift and Docker out of the box. Having done some work with Lambda, this is great news.


It was a great night and I look forward to doing Lightning talks again in the future. As a CocoaHeads organizer one of the most difficult things to find is a consistent supply of speakers. I think this provides people with an opportunity to try talking in an easier format.