4 ms·

I think Marco missed the point. He's taken a decline in Apple & iOS specific conferences, then assumed that means all conferences in general are over. But web

I think Marco missed the point. He's taken a decline in Apple & iOS specific conferences, then assumed that means all conferences in general are over. But web development conferences are still going fine. PyCon & DjangoCon & JSConf & Laracon all seem to be doing okay, and even have regional conferences. Indie developer conferences like FemtoConf are selling out. Business Of Software is still going strong. Even niche conferences like the Xojo programming language are holding annual conferences on multiple continents. There's still plenty of conferences for digital nomads & travel bloggers & Etsy makers & songwriters & authors out there. It's Apple-specific conferences that are disappearing. (I tweeted that last October [1] and I'm now kicking myself for not blogging about it instead.) Some of the Apple conferences pivoted to include Android and web-dev - for example, iOSDevCamp became Developer Camp and was hosted at Google premises. Maybe this is just part of a cycle, Apple-related conferences have disappeared before (like Wolf Rentzch's C4 conference did in 2010, [2] [3]). Or perhaps it's an early indicator that developers are moving on from Apple to other platforms. [1] https://twitter.com/syneryder/statuses/919474979086798848 https://twitter.com/syneryder/statuses/919474979086798848 [2] https://www.macworld.com/article/1151210/c4_end.html https://www.macworld.com/article/1151210/c4_end.html [3] http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/592949476/c4-release http://rentzsch.tumblr.com/post/592949476/c4-release

ghaff 9y ago
These things always go in cycles. There were once huge Unix conferences. Then Linux World tried to become all things open source and then imploded. Comdex was once, I think, the biggest conference in the world. The dynamics around Apple-related conferences is probably different but these things come and go. Personally, I do a lot in the cloud-native, containers, DevOps, etc. space and pretty much everything event-related I see there is growing enormously.
digi_owl 9y ago
That gets me thinking of how things seems to have creeped up the stack, so to speak. First one have hardware conferences, as the hardware is the platform. Then one get OS conferences. And now one have language conferences, because languages, thanks to the net, have adopted things like package managers that used to be the responsibility of the OS. It is almost frustrating to install a python based program these days, as the documentation will rarely list any dependencies. Instead the install step will just pull in a pile of packages via pypi or similar, with little chance of review or control.
- empthought 9y ago
  On the other hand, the dependencies are right there for all to see in requirements.txt or Pipfile.
  - digi_owl 9y ago
    So one have to parse a system specific file to get some insight...
    - empthought 9y ago
      Or just type `pipenv graph`, take your pick. http://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ http://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
shanev 9y ago
I was one of the earliest successful indie iOS developers. I've had my apps featured on Apple TV ads and billboards, and they've had tens of millions of downloads. The days of being able to do that are long gone. You'll have a few breakout hits every once in a while like HQ and Houseparty, but the amount of marketing needed to get there often outweighs development costs. There's a few big players and there's not much benefit to the long tail anymore unless you have an expensive niche app. I've recently switched to being a blockchain / Ethereum developer and there's a ton of conferences and 2-3 events a week in New York. Marco should title this "The end of indie iOS conferences". Swift has kind of taken a life of its own outside of just iOS. There's a few big Swift conferences each year, even ones specific to functional programming. I'm also excited for its prospects on the server.
- bsaul 9y ago
  i was really enthousiastic about swift as well, but the slow pace at which it is moving on big features such as concurrency (swift still has no native mutex or lock primitives, and nothing related to multithreading), makes me really feel this project isn't backed as much as it should by apple, especially compared to the ambition of the language ( world domination). This plus the fact that Apple still keep messing up its OS releases, while adding nothing interesting to the end-user... One thing is clear, my next project will be developped in a cross-platform environment.
smithclay 9y ago
For the small iOS events, think the changing/shrinking conference landscape needs to be considered alongside the changes in the iOS indie dev community the past 2-3 years. Don't think iOS developers are abandoning the platform, but I do think many indie developers (or those who were considering becoming an iOS indie developer) did leave. It became a lot harder to make a living as a full-time iOS indie dev. The indie devs brought a lot of the excitement and energy to these events and made for extremely interesting and fun conferences full of people from different design, engineering, and professional backgrounds. (Context: developer evangelist-type here, once focused on iOS-related developer conferences and attended many of them in North America and Europe.)

ghaff 9y ago

These things always go in cycles. There were once huge Unix conferences. Then Linux World tried to become all things open source and then imploded. Comdex was once, I think, the biggest conference in the world. The dynamics around Apple-related conferences is probably different but these things come and go. Personally, I do a lot in the cloud-native, containers, DevOps, etc. space and pretty much everything event-related I see there is growing enormously.

digi_owl 9y ago

That gets me thinking of how things seems to have creeped up the stack, so to speak. First one have hardware conferences, as the hardware is the platform. Then one get OS conferences. And now one have language conferences, because languages, thanks to the net, have adopted things like package managers that used to be the responsibility of the OS. It is almost frustrating to install a python based program these days, as the documentation will rarely list any dependencies. Instead the install step will just pull in a pile of packages via pypi or similar, with little chance of review or control.

empthought 9y ago
On the other hand, the dependencies are right there for all to see in requirements.txt or Pipfile.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  So one have to parse a system specific file to get some insight...
  - empthought 9y ago
    Or just type `pipenv graph`, take your pick. http://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ http://pipenv.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

shanev 9y ago

I was one of the earliest successful indie iOS developers. I've had my apps featured on Apple TV ads and billboards, and they've had tens of millions of downloads. The days of being able to do that are long gone. You'll have a few breakout hits every once in a while like HQ and Houseparty, but the amount of marketing needed to get there often outweighs development costs. There's a few big players and there's not much benefit to the long tail anymore unless you have an expensive niche app. I've recently switched to being a blockchain / Ethereum developer and there's a ton of conferences and 2-3 events a week in New York. Marco should title this "The end of indie iOS conferences". Swift has kind of taken a life of its own outside of just iOS. There's a few big Swift conferences each year, even ones specific to functional programming. I'm also excited for its prospects on the server.

bsaul 9y ago
i was really enthousiastic about swift as well, but the slow pace at which it is moving on big features such as concurrency (swift still has no native mutex or lock primitives, and nothing related to multithreading), makes me really feel this project isn't backed as much as it should by apple, especially compared to the ambition of the language ( world domination). This plus the fact that Apple still keep messing up its OS releases, while adding nothing interesting to the end-user... One thing is clear, my next project will be developped in a cross-platform environment.

smithclay 9y ago

For the small iOS events, think the changing/shrinking conference landscape needs to be considered alongside the changes in the iOS indie dev community the past 2-3 years. Don't think iOS developers are abandoning the platform, but I do think many indie developers (or those who were considering becoming an iOS indie developer) did leave. It became a lot harder to make a living as a full-time iOS indie dev. The indie devs brought a lot of the excitement and energy to these events and made for extremely interesting and fun conferences full of people from different design, engineering, and professional backgrounds. (Context: developer evangelist-type here, once focused on iOS-related developer conferences and attended many of them in North America and Europe.)