The Swift Alps 2016

I attended The Swift Alps in November 2016, an experimental conference that the organisers of App Builders wanted to make together with some of its speakers. The goals revolved around three main concepts: experimenting, broadcasting and socialising.

There were no talks, at least in the style of the typical conferences. Instead, every mentor introduced a topic which would be explored later in workshops during two-hour sessions. At the end of every session everyone changed to a different workshop to explore another topic.

For mentors, doing something like that must have been a challenge. They didn’t know who their audience was going to be. From beginners to experts, there were different expectations. How deep should they go with theory? How difficult should the exercises be? How could they keep experts engaged while spending time teaching more basic concepts to newcomers? They didn’t have either the safety net of a rehearsed speech nor the figure of a moderator. They were being asked many questions and were expected to answer them. Can you imagine yourself in that position?

Then consider the diversity of the audience. Attendees worked most of the times in teams formed by strangers, with different backgrounds and personalities. Some people liked to work alone, some in pairs and some others enjoyed big, messy groups. There were introverts, extroverts, optimists, pessimists,… you name it.

When I think about, measuring the success of this conference based on anyone’s personal experience was going to be misleading. A workshop that was brilliant in one session could have been a disaster the next one for any number of reasons:

• Something unexpected causes a disruption (e.g. bad Internet connection)
• You pair with someone with whom you don’t form a natural fit
• You decide to work alone but the topic was more suited to working collaboratively
• The topic or the exercises doesn’t match your expectations
• You can’t make progress because you have to teach someone less experience, or vice versa

But all workshops that I liked had something in common. Something that had its biggest expression during the one organised by Ash Furrow: they created a learning environment where making mistakes was OK.

There’s no learning without exploring, trying and making mistakes. Of course not every idea will be valid to solve a particular problem. But frequently you will not know that until you try at least some of them. Working in an environment where making mistakes is rewarded as a failure will undermine any attempt of learning and improving.

I also liked how Ash structured his workshop. Using the workflow of contributing to an open source project, he prepared coding exercises to be completed on several iterations with increasing complexity. That way, newbies could learn basic concepts without being overwhelmed while experienced developers could progress with more advanced stuff. That helped create an atmosphere where everyone could feel comfortable.

I’m happy to have been part of The Swift Alps experiment and I would like to thank every mentor of the workshops I attended:

• Maxim Cramer, on “Design and OSS”.
• Adrian Kosmaczewski, on “Server Side Swift”.
• Marin Todorov, on “How to give a talk”.
• Ash Furrow, on “Revisiting ReSwift”.
• Nicolas Seriot, on “Swift Data Visualization”.
• Sally Shepard, on “Accessibility”.